“Take this tube,” Belem said, “and go over to the transmitter. Careful, hold it with the blue side up. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Even if you can do it again with the silver marble,” I remarked, taking the tube, “can you be sure you’ll be any forrader? Nothing much happened when these two spheres shaped up.”
“The marble, as you call it,” Belem said, busily unhooking a glass spiral from its base, “is in effect an electron now, a negatively charged unit. Have you any idea how many tons of repulsion exist between cathode-ray particles, for instance, no matter how far apart they may be?
“You’re about to see a demonstration, The degree of repulsion is practically infinite for our purposes. When you get over there, open the transmitter door—and hurry, will you?”
THE silver marble lay there on the floor of the transmitter, dully gleaming in the red light from the laboratory. The light was red because that cylinder of crimson had breached the protective radiations outside and was reaching inward, quivering back under the assaults of defense-lights, but stubbornly gaining yard by yard toward the laboratory wall.
Belem worked methodically, setting up his tubes and prisms. The table cocooned with bright webbing floated now fast beside the door, ready to go out first when transmission functioned again. I could see dimly the face of the sleeper inside. The serenity of that face was impressive in a way I can’t describe.
The second-stage Mechandroid slept, yes, but he wasn’t wholly asleep now. The mind of the machine was awakening. It was time for it to wake. I could feel something in the very air that told me what was happening behind those impassive, emotionless features.
The shape of the features disturbed me, too. There was that haunting familiarity which I had no time now to track down. But I knew I had seen it before.
There wasn’t much time few speculation. I think the laboratory defenses collapsed all at once. I heard no warning but overloaded screens suddenly went down with blinding soundless flashes between us and the attacking forces. I think Belem must have been drawing heavily on the power-reserves in order to finish his experiment in geometric paradox.
He didn’t seem surprised, nor did the others, when there was a dazzle of red and green brilliance in conflict, streaming like colored lightnings through the vast room, making the twisted girders stand out in black silhouette. One of the Mechandroids at Belem’s elbow said something in one of the languages of this age which meant nothing to me.
Belem asked him a question. I caught the name of Paynter in the answer.
Belem moved a prism. His voice was quick but very calm. And this time as he spoke I caught an overtone in the air which the others, perhaps, had been realizing for some minutes. I can’t say what it was. A pressure, a deep, serene wave, a quality of newness and difference too intangible to name.
But it was there. After a moment or two I knew what it was.
The sleeper was awake. Not physically yet. His body remained helpless in the cocoon of light. But the mind was speaking to the minds of his creators, a smooth strong mind functioning like perfect machinery with a deep hum of power.
BELEM laid down his tools and turned to me, gripped my arm, urged me away toward a sloping catwalk that spanned the great room.
“What’s the matter?” I asked in bewilderment, following him willy nilly, because I could feel the metal of his machine-ancestry in that tight grip. “Something wrong? Won’t the gadget work?”
“It will work. You and I are needed elsewhere now. The others can handle the escape.”
“But I wanted to watch—”
“There is no time. You won’t see the demonstration, after all.”
I looked at him dubiously. There seemed to be no threat in his tone, but then there never was.
“What’s happening?”
“A platoon of men is attacking under Paynter. We must hold them back until the matter-transmitter is reactivated. I’m acting under orders. The second-stage Mechandroid is conscious enough to take charge. He told me what to do—look!”
CHAPTER XXI
Injection Spreading
AND that was when the last defense of all went down. There was a blazing flash of crimson that seemed to lick every comer of the room. It died and the white-lit air trembled a little in its wake. But only for an instant.
Then, from somewhere outside, a spear of red light drove at us and, almost concurrently, a steel piston, ten feet thick, shot out like a battering-ram after it. I had a single glimpse of that blank solid-steel muzzle rushing forward like a Titan’s fist—then it crashed through the wall of the building, with a thunderous impact and a shriek of torn and twisted metal, and ripped an irresistible path through the great girders.
It halted.
That cylinder of metal must have been more than half a mile long. Thirty feet of it extended through the riven wall into the chamber where we stood.
The blank muzzle opened like a shutter. Through a transparent wall I saw a little room banked with intricate control boards, and Paynter in a bucket-seat, his eyes shielded by darkened lenses, his mouth drawn down in a grimace as his hands moved swiftly across the panel before him.
A section of the cylinder dropped away. From its interior came leaping men, hooded and armored by light-colored suits of webbing. Each carried one of the basket-hilted paralysis-weapons.
I risked a look behind me. Far away, down a long vista of arched girders, I could see the Mechandroids gathered in a little group about the floating platform on which the second-stage Mechandroid lay and I thought that quick flashes of light were moving there—the same knife-like stabs of brightness I had seen when Belem divided his experimental sphere.
But the soldiers of Paynter were getting dangerously close—more than a score of them, inhuman and frightening in their hoods and protective suits.
Deliberately Belem turned his back on the soldiers running toward us and looked at me.
Twice before I had had this experience.
But it wasn’t a trick you could get used to—the quicksilver eyes expanding, rushing forward, slipping inside your head—and, impossibly, moving into place like supplementary lenses so that Belem was looking out through my own eyes, from within my mind.
I felt his will grip mine with paralyzing strength. Perhaps he thought I might resist. Certainly I would have, had I known what he intended.
Then he had control of my brain as well as my body. Belem’s thought? But they were my own thoughts—superimposed, directing—
He was using my mind, as he might use a telegraph-key, to send out a message—a summons.
I had time only to realize what it was Belem was calling. There was no time to react, to fight the summons—for the answer came almost upon the heels of the call.
From high above the great room I could see that answering shadow sweep into sight It came out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere, springing into being and moving forward with a speed so blinding I could not focus upon it. I had again that instant of recognition, of revulsion—that knowledge of its burning speed.
And then the nova of pure energy exploded outward, as it had done so many times before, from somewhere in the center of my consciousness.
BUT this time it was different. Never before had the thing been deliberately summoned. Whatever it was, from wherever it came, it had always before struck of its own will. Now it struck through mine—through Belem’s, speaking with my mind. And that gave it a significance and a quality of culmination which its coming had never had before. This time it meant something. This time, perhaps, I would know—
The shock of energy blinded me. I waited for the fading to begin.
There was no fading. Instead a second shock followed close upon the first, then another and another—wave after rising wave, tide upon tide of devouring violence. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I was too sick and shaken with the overloading of my nerves, the staggering blows of sensation that battered me. I could not think or reason. I only knew that this tim
e I was lost, drowned in the bursting violence.
It would not cease. It would never cease. It would go on forever . . .
I saw the shadow of violence fade from a face. Across what seemed to be wide distances I saw the reflection of unimaginable violence ebb. Yes—the mind behind that face had known the staggering onrush of inhuman tides as deeply as my own.
In the control room of the great steel cylinder Paynter met my gaze—and I read sick horror in his eyes.
I could not move. Every nerve in my body felt burned out, short-circuited. I could see and hear a little; that was all. I saw Belem clambering up into the hollow side of the huge piston.
In a moment he appeared behind Paynter. Paynter, I thought, tried to move. His stare broke away from mine. But the Mechandroid’s hands darted out, touching Paynter’s neck, his head, his spine. Belem spoke a word and took Paynter’s shoulder as the latter rose.
Belem’s quicksilver eyes were no longer within my mind, I realized.
But I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I had forgotten the armored soldiers.
Now I saw them. They were quite dead, all of them. I saw how they had died. I remembered the chain of bursting explosions as the killing shadow had swept down from above.
It was gone now—but it had fed well.
Belem and the silent obedient figure of Paynter came toward me. I felt the Mechandroid’s fingers reach out and probe deeply into my flesh. There was brief pain, then I could move again. But I still could not think very clearly.
Belem seemed to be listening to a voice I couldn’t hear. He said, as if to himself, “There isn’t much time—” and urged both of us forward. Now that I turned, I could see that the matter-transmission chamber at the other end of the room was empty. The crowding Mechandroids with their slowly waking Sleeper had gone. They had stepped, in so many instants, from this place to some other planet that might be anywhere at all in the immeasurable vastness of the Galaxy.
“Come,” Belem said and we moved toward the matter-transmitter.
The rusted metal walls shimmered around us, faded, vanished.
Across the depths of space the atoms that made us up dispersed, drew out, reintegrated again. Bright alloy plates shimmered into being. We had stepped again from one world to another.
BELEM pushed the panel open. We stepped out—into a cavern of dusty rock.
On the floor at our feet a little glittering tree stood motionless, beside it a flat metal sheet with wire bars. Belem sighed with satisfaction.
“I didn’t think they could do it,” he said. “Word went out to one of us in the laboratories to get these things replaced but I didn’t really think—well, there just isn’t much time. Cortland, bring Paynter here, please.”
I obeyed, moving in a curious dreamlike state, the aftermath perhaps of that monstrous rapport with the slaying shadow. Belem was kneeling beside the barred device that Dr. Essen had used to create the vibratory matrix that had isolated us from space.
“Useless,” he said. “As I half suspected.”
I looked up at the enclosing walls of stone, beyond which my own home planet stretched. It was curiously comforting to know that the rock overhead and the rock underfoot were the native structure of Earth. Here, on this uneven floor, my own body had fallen to dust.
I wondered if the drifts in which our feet left prints had once been—
“This is the cave of the time-axis then,” I said slowly. “And it’s no good. Not if you can’t work the machine Dr. Essen used. Is it too complicated even for you, Belem? I should have thought—”
“That isn’t the problem. It’s comparatively simple really. The trouble amounts to personalized mental mutation. We could understand how a thing as simple as a Neanderthaler’s battle hammer worked but we couldn’t use it—we-don’t have the same muscular training and balance. And mental habits are far more subtle.
“An invention, in practical application, fits its age and the people of that age. By studying this apparatus, I could work back to the basic principle and construct something similar that would operate in my hands. But only Dr. Essen could use the device that’s so completely hers. In effect it’s an extension of her mind. And we’re in a hurry. I’ve had to make other plans.”
He glanced toward the closed panel of the transmitter and before he had finished speaking, it began to open. I think there was some mental warning which Mechandroids could exchange over considerable distances. Belem put a restraining hand on my arm as a second Mechandroid stepped into the cavern. He came directly from some world of dust and wind, for his hair was wildly blown and a reddish dust shook from his garments as he moved. He carried very carefully in both hands a milky-white crystalline egg.
Without a word he came forward, put it in Belem’s hands and turned back to the transmitter. It sighed shut behind him and he was gone—back, perhaps, to the wind and dust of his unknown world.
Gingerly Belem laid the crystalline globe on the floor between the glass tree and the useless Essen device.
“This will do what has to be done,” he said, looking down at it. “Give us a temporary force-field. It doesn’t tap the basic cosmic energies as Dr. Essen’s does but I hope it will protect us long enough. After the second-stage Mechandroid wakes we’ll be safe. He can take over.”
“And do what?” I asked, a little rebelliously. “Keep us asleep, set up a matrix to guard us—sure. And then send us in to the future? Maybe I don’t want to go any more. What good could I do there alone? De Kalb’s gone. Dr. Essen’s gone. Even Murray would have been more help than nobody. As it is, I’d rather stay right here. It looks like an interesting world, what little I’ve managed to see of it. If you hadn’t interfered I think I could have got along very well with Paynter.”
“Except for one thing,” he said calmly. “You’re a carrier of the nekronic infection, as I think the People of the Face may have planned from the beginning. As a spur to prevent just what you’ve suggested.”
“Why are you going, then?” I demanded. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, it does have. Two things. First—I don’t know why I’m going. The order came and I must obey it.”
“From the second-stage Mechandroid?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes. The second reason is”—He looked up at me over his shoulder. He was kneeling to puzzle over the Essen machine, and gave me a sudden cool smile. “I go under orders,” he said. “You go because of the nekronic spur. Do you know why Paynter must go too?”
“Because you’ve got him hypnotized,” I said. “Why else?”
“Paynter is infected too.”
I GAPED at him.
“Of course he is. Why else did he fail to kill you when he knew the danger you carried wherever you went? But suppose he had killed you—and the murders went on? The authorities would have had to look further—they would have found Paynter himself. So long as you lived you were the obvious scapegoat.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “It adds up. Is that the only reason why he has to go with us? Does your second-stage Mechandroid care about that?”
“Of course not.” Belem had turned from the mystifying Essen machine and was working carefully with the milky-crystal globe now, his large fingers moving over it with the same clumsy deftness I had watched so often in De Kalb’s identical fingers.
“Of course not. The real reason is very different. You’ve probably guessed it already. Do you not know, really, why you have trusted me so far? If your mind had put up any real opposition I couldn’t have done all I did with it. Don’t you know why you and I must go on to the world of the Face together—as we first set out to do?”
I stood there in the dusty cavern, in perfect silence, not surprised to find that I was trembling a little as his metal eyes met mine. After a long time I said, very softly, in a shaken, questioning voice, “De Kalb—De Kalb?”
“I think so,” he said calmly. Then he reached out and with one finger stirred the heavy dust on the floor.
He looked up at me, smiling wryly. “De Kalb is there. De Kalb is that. But here—” He struck his head a light rap, “Here I think he still lives. Latent. In abeyance. But still here.”
I sat down suddenly, in the dust that may once have been Jerry Cortland. I was remembering the sudden oblivion that had briefly overtaken all of us who were duplicates of the sleepers in the cave as those original bodies fell apart.
“There would be no reason for you to go on to the World of the Face alone,” he said, “if you went alone. But you won’t. You can’t. You never have been alone, have you, in this era? Always Topaz—who is Dr. Essen, asleep—or Paynter, who is Murray, asleep, or I—who am De Kalb—was with you. None of us knew. All of us have been moving along the lines of some pattern vaster than we can guess. Only now it beings to emerge a little.”
As I drew a breath to speak the sound of the opening panel startled us both. Only Paynter, standing motionless in the grip of his hypnosis, did not move. My quick start was futile but Belem’s two hands covered the crystal globe, ready, I think, to activate it and throw out the temporary force-field that would isolate us from attack—for awhile.
CHAPTER XXII
Reunion
WE WERE both expecting soldiers to come pouring from the transmitter. But no one came through the open panel. Instead, a voice spoke. A woman’s voice, cool, clear, level.
“Ira?” it said. “Mr. Cortland? Colonel Murray, are you there?”
Dr. Essen! I thought. Letta Essen! An instant later Topaz came alone across the threshold.
It was Topaz and yet—it was Letta Essen too, more clearly than I had ever seen her before in the girl’s amazingly adaptable features.
“I expected this,” Belem said with perfect calm. “I didn’t even send for her, I was so sure she would have to come. It’s the pattern, Cortland. It’s working itself out faster and faster now, beyond our control, I think. Is she Letta Essen?”
I nodded in bewilderment. The voice was not Dr. Essen’s, of course, for it came from the vocal cords of Topaz, but it was not Topaz’s voice either. It was cool, emotionless, nobody’s voice. Dispassion speaking aloud. And the face was Topaz’s face but changed’, different.
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