He stroked the beard down smoothly over his pouter-pigeon chest.
“I do not wish to make you feel badly,” he declared, “but I can’t see how you would have the intelligence to grasp it. After all, you are a people from an earlier age, an almost barbaric age.”
“Try her,” growled Gary.
“All right,” said the old man, but there was a patronizing tone to his thoughts.
Gary gained a confused impression of horrific equations, of bracketed symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure of meaning—a meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind instinctively shuddered away from it.
Then the thoughts were gone and Gary’s mind was spinning with them, with the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic structure that had been in the mathematics.
He looked at Caroline and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of awe spread over her face.
“Why,” she said, and hesitated slightly, “…why, the equations cancel, represent both everything and nothing, both zero and the ultimate in everything imaginable.”
Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind of their host.
“You understand,” said the faltering thought. “You grasp the meaning perfectly.”
“Didn’t I tell you,” said Gary. “Of course, she understands.’ ”
Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her thoughts aloud. “That means the energy would be timeless. It would have no time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost infinite. There’d be no stopping it, once it started.”
“You are right,” said the old man. “It would be raw, created energy from a region where four-dimensional laws are no longer valid. It would be timeless and formless.”
“Formless,” said Caroline. “Of course, it would be formless. It wouldn’t be light, or heat, or matter, or motion, or any other form of energy such as we know. But it could be anything. It would be waiting to become something. It could crystallize into anything.”
“Good Lord,” said Gary, “how could you handle stuff like that? Your hyperspheres wouldn’t handle it. It could mold space itself. It could annihilate time.”
Caroline looked at him soberly.
“If I could create a fifth-dimensional trap,” she said, “if I could trap it in the framework of the medium from which it came. Don’t you see that such a framework would attract it, would gather it in and hold it. Like a battery holds energy. Like water seeking its own level and coming to rest.”
“Sure,” agreed Gary, “if you could create a fifth-dimensional trap. But you can’t. It’s eternity. The dimension of eternity. You can’t go fooling around with eternity.”
“Yes, she can,” said the old man.
The two of them stared at him, not believing.
“Listen closely,” said the oldster. “By rotating a circle through three dimensions you create a sphere. Rotate the sphere through four dimensions and you have a hypersphere. You already have created this. You have bent time and space around a mass to create a hypersphere, a miniature universe.
Now all you have to do is rotate the hypersphere through five-dimensional space.”
“But you’d have to be in five-dimensional space to do that,” objected Gary.
“No, you wouldn’t,” contended the old man. “Scattered throughout three-dimensional space are ether eddies and time faults and space traps—call them anything you like. They are a common phenomena and they’re nothing more, when you come right down to it, than isolated bits of four-dimensional space scattered around through three-dimensional space. The same thing would apply to a fifth dimension in the fourth dimension.”
“But how,” asked Caroline, “would one go about it? How would one rotate a hypersphere through the fifth dimension?”
Again Gary had that sense of confusion as the thoughts of the ancient one swept over him, thoughts that translated themselves into symbols and equations and brackets of mathematics that it seemed impossible any man could know.
“Gary,” gasped Caroline, “have you a pencil and some paper?”
Gary fumbled in his pocket and found an old envelope and a stub of pencil.
He handed them to her.
“Please repeat that very slowly,” she said, smiling at the old man.
Gary watched in amazement as Caroline, slowly and carefully, jotted down the formulas, equations, symbols—carefully checking and going over them, checking and rechecking so there could be no mistake.
“It will take power,” she said. “Tremendous power. I wonder if the Engineers can supply it.”
“They have magnetic power,” said Gary. “They ought to be able to give you all you need.”
The old man’s eyes were twinkling. “I am remembering the Hellhounds,” he said. “The ones who would have the universe destroyed. I cannot seem to like them. It seems to me that something should be done about them.”
“But what?” asked Gary. “They seem to be all-powerful. By the time we get back they may have battered the city into a mass of ruins.”
The oldster nodded almost sleepily, but his eyes were glowing.
“We have had ones like that in our history,” he said. “Ones who overrode the nations and imposed their will, standing in the way of progress. But always someone found something that would break them. Someone found a greater weapon or a greater strength and they went their way. Their names and works were dust and they were forgotten and the civilization that they sought to mold to their own selfish ends went on as if they had never been.”
“But I don’t see…” began Gary, and then suddenly he did—as clearly as light. He smote his knee and yelled his enthusiasm.
“Of course,” he cried. “We have a weapon. A weapon that could wipe them out. The fifth-dimensional energy!”
“Certainly you have,” said the old man.
“That would be barbarous,” protested Caroline.
“Barbarous!” shouted Gary. “Isn’t it barbarous to want to see the universe destroyed so the Hellhounds can go back to the beginning and take it over, control it, dominate it, take over galaxy after galaxy as a new universe is born? Shape it to their needs and desires. Hold in thrall every bit of life that develops on every cooling planet. Become the masters of the universe.”
“We must hurry, then,” said Caroline. “We must get back. Minutes count. We still may be able to save the Engineers and the universe, wipe out the Hellhounds.”
She rose impatiently to her feet.
The old man protested. “You would go so soon?” he asked. “You would not stay and eat with me? Or tell me more about this place at the edge of the universe? Or let me tell you strange things that I know you would be glad to hear?”
Gary hesitated. “Maybe we could stay a while,” he suggested.
“No,” said Caroline. “We must go.”
“Listen,” said Gary to the old man, “why don’t you come along with us? We’d be glad to have you. We could use you in the fight. There are things that you could tell us that would help.”
The old man shook his bead. “I cannot go,” he said. “For, you see, you are right. I may be only a shadow. A very substantial shadow, perhaps, but still just a shadow of probability. You can come to me, but I can’t go back with you. If I left this planet I might puff into nothingness, revert to the non-existence of the thing that never was.”
He hesitated. “But there’s something,” he said, “that makes me suspect I am not a shadow… that this is actuality, that the Earth will follow the course history tells me it has followed.”
“What is that?” asked Gary.
“It is a thing,” the old man said, “that I cannot tell you.”
“Perhaps we can come back and see you again,” said Caroline. “After all this trouble is over.”
“No, my child,” he said. “You will never come, for ours are lives that never should have m
et. You represent the beginning and I represent the end. And I am proud that the Earth’s last man could have been of service to one of the beginners.”
They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.
“I will walk with you to your ship,” said the old man. “I do not walk a great deal now, for the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting old.”
Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert, a shrill-voiced wind that played an eternal overture for the stage of desolation old Earth had become.
“I live with ghosts,” said the old man as they walked toward the ship. “Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.
“Probably you wonder that I resemble a man so much. Perhaps you thought that men, in time to come, would evolve into specialized monstrosities—great, massive brains that had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of emotional reactions, unstable as the very wind, or foolish philosophers, or, worse yet, drab realists. But we became none of these things. We kept our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads.”
They reached the ship and stood before the opened outer valve.
The old man waved a hand toward the mighty metal building.
“The proudest city Man ever built,” he said. “A city whose fame spread to the far stars, to distant galaxies. A city that travelers told about in bated whispers. A place to which came the commerce of many solar systems, ships from across far inter-galactic space. But now it is crumbling into dust and ruin. Soon the desert will claim it and the wind will sing a death dirge for it and little, furry animals will burrow in its bones.”
He turned to them and Gary saw a half-mystic light shining in his eyes.
“Thus it is with cities,” he said, “but Man is different. Man marches on and on. He outgrows cities and builds others. He outgrows planets. He is creating a heritage, a mighty heritage that in time will make him the master of the universe.
“But there will be interludes of defeat. Times when it seems that all is lost—that Man will slip again to the primal savagery and ignorance. Times when the way seems too hard and the price too great to pay. But always there will be bugles in the sky and a challenge on the horizon and the bright beckoning of ideals far away. And Man will go ahead, to greater triumphs, always pushing back the frontiers, always moving up and outward.”
The old man turned around and headed back toward the doorway in the building. He went without a word of farewell and his sandaled feet left a tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
« ^ »
THE black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal space again. Normal, but not right.
Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline’s quick gasp of surprise.
“There’s something wrong!” she cried.
There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.
There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.
There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.
It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.
Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.
Something happened and here we are—in what strange corner of the universe?
“Something went wrong,” Caroline said again. “Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps.”
“More likely,” Gary told her, “the fault lies in the human brain—or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, he might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm.”
Caroline nodded at him. “The mistakes creep in so easy,” she admitted.
“Like mice… mice running in the mind.”
“We can turn around and go back,” said Gary, but even as he said it he knew that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be out of focus at the other end as well.
“But we can’t,” said Caroline.
“I know we can’t,” said Gary. “I spoke too quickly. Without thinking.”
“We can’t even try,” said Caroline. “The wheel is gone.” He saw that she was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out and they were here alone.
Here? he asked. And where was here?
There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there was no way of telling.
“Lost,” said Caroline. “Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you remember, and covered them with leaves.”
The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the controls again.
“We’ll look it over,” he said.
“There may be someone there,” said Caroline.
Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Some thing.
The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.
The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.
Finally Gary shook his head. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”
They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet’s surface were vegetation of a sort.
“Toadstools,” said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. “Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it’s not asparagus.”
“Like something out of a goblin book,” said Gary.
Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn’t go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.
They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits—slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.
“Let’s go out,” said Gary, gruffly, “and have a look around.”
“Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”
“I am,” he admitted. “Pink with purple spots.”
The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.
There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.
The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.
On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.
“You’d expect to see a goblin,” Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.
All at once the goblin was there.
He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.
“Good Lord!” said Gary. “I know that fellow!”
The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled like an excited turkey.
“He’s the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference,” said Gary. “You remember, when they got all the aliens together—all those that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him—or one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did now, and I thought that…”
“There’s another one,” said Caroline.
The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed feet swinging over the edge.
Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike terror and revulsion into one’s soul.
Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until they stood with their backs against it.
Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.
“Let’s go away,” said Caroline. “Let’s get in the ship and go.”
“Wait,” counseled Gary. “Let us wait a while. We can always go. These things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the Engineers called in.”
He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.
“Hello,” he called.
They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him out of slitted eyes.
“We are friends,” said Gary. They didn’t move a muscle.
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