Man of Two Worlds Page 2

  “You have no right to it.”

  “I must have it.” Her tone was deadly as if she had power to blast him out of existence if he refused her demand.

  “Someone might come—”

  “No one will come. No one ever comes this late at night. Give me that keyboard.’’

  The old woman approached him like the menace of death itself. Her green, glowing eyes reflected the position light with an intensity that stabbed through him.

  He turned like a machine and went towards the sealed chamber of the master keyboard. His fingers pressed the forbidden combination that he was not supposed to know, and the gate swung open.

  “Ah—that is good,” the old woman whispered.

  Ketan cursed himself for an ineffectual fool. How had she ever determined that he had altered the factor settings of the master integration ? The memory circuits were supposed to be perfect. He knew he had returned the integration to normal. It was impossible to detect the tampering. Yet she had detected it.

  But now the soft click of keys hummed under her fingers. So swiftly did her hands move that the distinct click of each key was no longer distinguishable, but the sounds blended into each other in a steady flow of monotonous sound that was broken only when she pressed the indicator lever and called for an index.

  Ketan stared fascinated and helpless. He saw after many moments of intense study that she had reassembled the master integration in almost unrecognizable form. He prayed silently that she had retained all the disturbed factors in the memory circuit so that the Karildex might be returned to normal. If she failed to do so, there would be chaos—not only for Ketan, but for all Kronweld.

  Abruptly, the chanting music of the keys ceased, and the old woman turned to him. “You are the only one/’ she murmured. “There can be no other.” And suddenly her eyes were piercing his. She stared at him with a quick, mute pleading as if she would bare her entire soul to him, and tears started in her eyes,

  “What do you—?” he began.

  She turned back quickly. Her eyes were staring into space. “Three people must die,” she said, hardly whispering the words. “Three must die.”

  III.

  Her fingers set themselves to the keys again and moved faster than sight could follow. Then she pressed an indicator key. An index appeared on the panel. Ketan stared at it. With a shock of premonition he recognized Leader Hoult, Head of the Seekers Council. It was he, along with the twenty other Councilors, before whom he would appear with the evidence of the forbidden knowledge he would reveal to all Kronweld.

  “Look at the indications of his factors,” the old woman com-commanded.

  Ketan looked. There, revealed, were the factors and concepts that Leader Hoult had submitted to be integrated into the mass will of Kronweld. There were the desires and wants and impulses that he had gained through the experiences of his life and made him the man he was. Ketan gave them a cursory glance.

  “What about them?”

  “Look closely. Watch these that 1 intensify. Tell me what they are.”

  Each factor as it was picked from the general graph and intensified was indicated by a code figure on a dial. By long experience, Ketan believed there was no factor code that he could not recognize and identify on sight.

  His mind went spinning over the catalogue of infinitely complex combinations that he knew. The number before him was totally unfamiliar. Its strangeness appalled him. A sense of cold foreboding stole along his spine.

  “I can’t be expected to remember them all,” he said.

  “Look it up.”

  He turned to the manual index on the wall and pressed the tabs that corresponded to the index of the unfamiliar factors. The proper defining sheet should have slid out.

  There was only a blank.

  “You see?” the old woman exclaimed. There was a horrible gloating in her voice. “Now this one.”

  Another unfamiliar number appeared. The index for that, too, was blank.

  “What does it mean? How did you know about this ?” Ketan asked in a thin voice edged with terror. “It can have no meaning. There must be an error in the machine.”

  “An error in the Karildex?” The woman laughed harshly. “How many times have you boasted of its accuracy? No—there is no error. Now watch this one.”

  Another, totally different index flashed before them. Ketan recognized it as taken from the matrix of Teacher Daran, the foremost mathematician of the House of Wisdom. Ketan stared at the row of factor indexes. Out of the hundreds, there were three that registered blank.

  “You see—as hard as they tried to keep them out of their matrices, they failed to do so when the proper influences are subtracted. Look at their matrices.”

  She made another manipulation and drew from a slot two transparent squares. The surfaces were covered with hundreds of tiny perforations. The woman placed it over a printed sheet and held a magnifying glass over the whole.

  “It is perfectly normal to all appearances.”

  “But what does it mean?” Ketan whispered, more to himself than to the old woman.

  She answered him. “It means that here are persons within our midst who have had experiences that do not conform to any possible experience available in Kronweld—-or in Dark Land or Fire Land, either, for they have been catalogued.

  “Can you understand that? No —you cannot. I will tell you. It means they have come from outside !” she seemed to shriek the final word.

  “Outside? What is outside?” “It is beyond … beyond the limits of Kronweld. In the world where no man of Kronweld has ever penetrated. Can you not conceive of that? Have you not dreamed of a place of sand and desert and winds and a lone, silent rock that stands like a monument in the desert?”

  Her voice had dropped to a low insinuation that penetrated Ketan’s mind like a thin knife blade. He trembled and backed away from her, white faced.

  “How do you know of that?”

  “You are Ketan,” she said simply. “I know many things about you.”

  “How do you know anything about me? Who are you?”

  She ignored his questions—and his hands that had seized the thin sticks of her shoulders.

  “There is one more index you must see,” she said. She shook off his gripping hands and pressed a series of keys in swift order—but the name was left off. The index appeared. He saw a dozen alien, unknown factors in that series, and checked them. Blanks, all.

  “Whose is that one?”

  She pressed a final key. The identification factor appeared. He uttered a single, sobbing cry. ‘

  “Elta!”

  The master control board had been set to cancel out the factors of the Temple of Birth, the Edge, the date of the beginning of Kron-weld’s history, and a half dozen other factors for which Ketan saw no purpose in canceling.

  It was in the absence of these factors that the unknown factors on the matrices of the three persons became evident. No one would have discovered them in a thousand tara unless he knew exactly what he was looking for.

  The old woman had known.

  But Elta!

  Ketan’s mind shut itself against

  the significance of her unknown factors. There was nothing uncommon about Elta—except her loveliness, the wonder and beauty of her, the supremacy of her Seeking.

  The old woman had said there were three who must die.

  “Tell me what this means,” he demanded.

  She hesitated while her agile fingers began the resetting of the master control board.

  “It was a miracle finding you here—to be able to show you these. It was more than I dreamed, to find you right here in the hall of the Karildex.

  She turned and looked upon him with her old, still-bright eyes. “You wonder who I am ? I shall tell you. But there are many things you must know first.

  “I warn you that danger and death lies over Kronweld. Already its arm is raised for the final blow to destroy this world. These three are agents of this destruction. There a
re others, but these are the most important.

  “You think me mad? Wait until I am finished. But these three must die. That will be your task. Slay these three!”

  His mind spun. He shook his head as if to clear it. He tried to figure out why he was standing here listening to this mad, old woman when he should be calling for a Serviceman to take her away. Plotting death for two of the foremost Seekers in Kronweld—and Elta.

  “You are insane—I’ll hear no more. You shall tell the rest of your story to the First Group.” “Sit down!”

  It was not a mere verbal command. It became a hypnotic leash that reached out and gripped his mind, forced his muscles to hold him fast to the seat before the keyboard.

  Against his will, he remained and listened.

  “For more than a hundred tara an organization has existed in our midst and none have guessed its existence. The final objective of that organization is the destruction of Kronweld. They fear us and they will destroy us. They are the Statists.

  “They have withheld the death blow only awaiting the proper time. This organization has used us, used our Seeking; it has drained Kronweld of the secrets of its Seeking and used them against us. Only one more are they waiting for and then their knowledge will satisfy them and Kronweld shall die. That is an understanding of our use of atomic forces.”

  “You’re utterly mad,” Ketan said in a low voice. “Do you expect me to sit here and believe such a fantastic lie ?”

  “What of the factors you could not identify?”

  “There’ll be a natural explanation of them and I’ll find it right here in the Karildex. Who would compose such a group? What would be the purpose behind them?”

  “I’ll tell you who they are, because you alone out of all Kronweld could understand, for you have seen their world. The world of colored sands and the thin pinnacle of rock, standing like a monument in the desert. They are—” There was a sudden sharp sound from the door of the hall. It was out of their line of sight. The old woman instantly extinguished the light and slipped away from the keyboard.

  In the darkness Ketan heard her hoarse, dismayed exclamation. “Hoult!”

  Then she was gone. Ketan hurriedly shut up the master keyboard in the secret panels and slipped away to the other side of the Karildex. There, he pressed the button on a position light which was not visible from the door. He set up a sequence and pretended to be studying as footsteps grew nearer in the vast echoing hollowness of the hall.

  “Technician!”

  The voice rang out sharply. “Respect to you, sir,” Ketan called. His heart was thudding within him. “I am here.”

  He hurried around the end of the machine toward the leader. Why had the man come, he wondered. He sensed an impending disaster to his plans before they ever began to be put into operation. He didn’t want to meet this man now.

  He came face to face with him at the end of the monstrous machine.

  “Technician!”

  “Wisdom, sir.”

  “I was passing and saw the door open, but no lights. It seemed strange that there would still be inquiries this time of night,” Hoult’s black eyes looked down from a height that made Ketan look up into them.

  “No one was here, sir, I was working on a little problem of my own. I was just getting ready to leave.”

  “That is good, I commend you for your studiousness.”

  But Hoult’s thoughts were not upon his words. Ketan watched his shining, ebon eyes send a darting glance into the black reaches of the hall. Surely he couldn’t know.

  “There have been reports in the city,” Hoult said as if it were an idle afterthought, “of an old, insane woman who escaped from confinement. She has not, by any chance, been near the Karildex today?” Ketan shook his head without hesitation. “No. I have seen no very old persons at all today. They seldom come here. The Karildex makes little difference to them. They live their lives without offense or friction.”

  “Yes … well—” Hoult agreed idly with this bit of philosophy while his eyes still pierced the dark shadows ‘beneath the looming machine. “Report at once if you see any such. Wisdom to you, Technician.”

  “Wisdom, Leader.”

  The man vanished slowly in the shadows and Ketan stood staring after him. Why hadn’t he told the Leader that the mad old woman was here now, hiding in the darkness of the great hall ? Was it only that she had threatened to expose his use of the master control board?

  She would have a hard time convincing them of that—if they thought she was insane. She could not prove her accusations.

  But there was something more that held him back. There were the unexplainable factor indexes, the fact that she knew of his visions of the red desert with the pinnacle —how had she known such a thing —and more: there was something that reached out from that withered husk in intangible and unspoken communication and found a chord of sympathy in his being. He wanted to know who she was. He must know.

  He turned back into the shadows where he had seen her disappear. He cautiously turned on a single light that dimly illumined the section of the hall.

  But she was not there. She must have slipped around the other end of the machine. He raced down the length of a hundred positions and came to the end. Another light failed to reveal her presence anywhere.

  Then he saw her.

  A distant, dim shadow flitted out from the looming hulk of the machine at the far end. She ran with incredible speed towards the door and vanished into the night.

  He raced after her, silently, not daring to call out. At the door he hesitated, the night breeze splashing over his face. But there was no sign of any moving object—only a pair of strolling companions on the far side of the road that passed in front of the building.

  No sign of any fleeing woman— an old and withered husk running through the night.

  It was useless to attempt to follow her.

  She would come again, he knew.

  IV.

  He closed the doors of the great building for a final time that night and made his way slowly out towards the road. It was late. He wondered if both Elta and Teacher Daran would have given him up. Still, it was not that late. Much of Kronweld’s life did not sleep until just before the rising of the first globe.

  Thoughtlessly, he had taken his day cloak and now he flung it about him. The heavy, leaded cloth felt good, cutting out the night wind. Though the air was warm, an unaccountable chill stole over him.

  After a few hundred steps he identified its source. It centered in the fact of the curious coincidence that on this night he would - have met all three of those accused by the old woman of plotting against Kronweld.

  He puzzled over Leader Hoult’s concern about the woman. Though he had tried to appear calm, it was obvious that he was highly agitated over her. It was too fantastic to believe there could be any truth to the old woman’s story.

  Ketan tried to shrug away the puzzle, the mystery of it, and the unreasonableness. Almost, it had made him forget the tremendous step he was about to take in proclaiming his discovery of the means of creation of life to Kronweld.

  He hurried through the night as if trying to flee from the haunting memory of the old woman’s face looming up before him like a dead and shriveled fruit.

  He turned into the roadway that led north. A stetor distant was the blank curtain of the great Edge.

  Never, since he first emerged from the Temple of Birth, had he looked upon that sheet of blackness without experiencing the swift thrill of the unknown that now swept through him, leaving a faint chill in its wake. At times the mere contemplation of the thing left him trembling and weak.

  When he had been younger he had often contemplated the possibility of building a rising machine, one that would carry a man high enough to reach the top of the great Edge. He knew that the energies of atomic engines were more than enough to make such a machine possible.

  But he knew now that such a dream was a childish fantasy. Nothing could ever go beyond the edge of the Edge
. It was nothing, a vast wall of negative existence that stretched from positive to negative infinity. Top, sides, expanse, depth —all were terms that had no meaning when applied to the great Edge.

  An almost physical pain of yearning and desire for knowledge passed through him when he thought of the vast mystery here, a Mystery that no one among the Seekers of Kronweld would recognize—except the Unregistereds. A Mystery, therefore, that had to be examined illegally.

  As he walked, staring into the blackness of the Edge, he thought of Elta. What would she say when he told her he must go to see Teacher Daran? More: what would she say when he told her of his decision? He knew. Somehow— he would have to change her mind about it—

  There was a sudden tingling at the roots of his brain. It ate along the nerve channels of his body and turned his quick steps into slow, erratic ploddings.

  Before him the infinite curtain of blackness began to lose its empty nothingness. A reddish tinge began to touch the black and Ketan cried out involuntarily.

  It’ coming again.

  Wind began to whip about his head. Sharp daggers of sand, borne aloft on its breath, stabbed even through the heavy day cloak. The reddish sky was brightening and the world became a howling madness of driving sheets of sand and wind.

  Kronweld became as if it had never existed.

  He was in the midst of a desert, a red, howling desert where life was. inconceivable. From horizon to horizon there was nothing—only the bleak vastness of sand and sky and wind.

  Except—

  Except for a single sliver of rock that broke the bare line between sand and sky, curiously visible as if the driving sheets of sand were, transparent.

  The pinnacle seemed closer this time. Each time it seemed closer. His feet slogged through the powdery, resistant sand until his muscles ached and cried out for relief. But something insistent would not let him rest. He had to drive on and on, whipped and torn by the ceaseless winds. Perhaps this time he would reach the pinnacle—