Man of Two Worlds Page 23

  “He claims no knowledge of Igon or of Elta or any of the organization?”

  “No—of course he’s lying.”

  “I wonder. I wish there were some way to make them confess. We’ve tried before and never found one who would admit seeing Igon. There must be some mental compulsion impressed upon them in the pinnacle. How I’d love to lock with that great man of yours just once before I die—provided lie’s still alive.”

  “Igon is dead,” Ketan said.

  The voice chuckled. “I’m afraid your persuasion is too weak. Igon and his organization—what is left of it—still exist, perhaps in one of the other planes. We are sure of that, but we don’t worry about it much. You see, we have a plan. Would you care to tell him about it, Bocknor? You are in charge of the arrangements.”

  “No—let’s get on. We’re wasting time with this,” Bocknor snarled unexpectedly.

  “Tell him!”

  There was a moment’s silence in which Ketan could hardly refrain from exclaiming aloud. Here it was—the weakness he had hoped to find. There was schism within the Statist headquarters.

  By their very restraint in the face of white-hot emotions, Bocknor and the Director gave away the situation. Ketan knew the fat, stooped man was contending with every fraction of power he could command to wrest control from the half man, half machine that guided the Statists.

  “We have atomic power projectors almost finished which will be projected through the Gateway and turn Kronweld into a molten vat,” said Bocknor.

  “Pleasant fellow, isn’t he?” said the Director. “And now can you guess what we are going to do with you? We are going to send you back and watch you try to convince your fellows that you should prepare to fight back. Oh, yes, we … that is I … can see quite well what transpires in Kronweld. I can see everywhere with my eyes of metal and glass and electrons. They are much better than the old ones.

  “So I am going to enjoy immensely the spectacle of you trying to convince them of the existence of Earth. You will have to be careful, you know, because they will probably be quite upset over your disregard for the Temple of Birth. I suggest you work through the Unregistereds. That’s quite an organization you have. But be sure to provide me good entertainment until Bocknor gets his projectors ready. I’ll enjoy your struggles immensely.”

  “Don’t you think I might succeed?” asked Ketan.

  “No. I have not studied Kronweld all these years for nothing. Success is absolutely impossible for you, yet you will go on struggling until the day that Bocknor turns on his beam. That will be the amusing part of it.”

  “Then why are you so afraid of Kronweld. Why can’t you let it live?”

  “The pinnacle, you fool, and Igon’s group. They’ll succeed eventually or would if we didn’t cut them off, but you have absolutely no chance of success in the time that is left. If you were another Igon, I might not take a chance, but there is no danger to us in you.

  “You came close to some important discoveries, however, I must give you credit. You guessed correctly that the Temple of Birth formed the weakness of your culture in the many superstitions it created. The mysterious appearance of life made a taboo of all investigation into life processes and led to the existence of a whole group of so-called forbidden Mysteries, as you so quaintly called them. Your resulting science had no biology, no bacteriology, no physiology. All chemistry, physics and electronics. It must have been a strange world to live in, but I suppose few of you realized the peculiarity.”

  “How do you know of these sciences, then?”

  ‘“Our history tells us that they once flourished on Earth and we have managed some development of our own. Since they are mostly observational sciences, they require little creative intellect, an admittedly scarce item among us.”

  “I was right then, and if those superstitions were removed, Kronweld would be far superior to any force you could bring together upon Earth.”

  “Quite right. And because the trend of your culture is slowly moving in this direction, we have decided that it must be destroyed before it becomes a power that might overthrow us. Do you see ?”

  Ketan didn’t see. His mind failed to grasp an insight into the thought processes of the Director. So alien was the concept of war and conquest to any mind conditioned in Kronweld, that Ketan could not begin to grasp the outline of the desires that motivated such action.

  He would have to act blindly as if the Director and the Statists were nothing more than a great, insensitive machine created for the destruction of Kronweld. But there was one clue to the impulses of the Director. It seemed obvious that his injuries had made him feel so much less than other men that he had spent a lifetime endeavoring to be more than any other man and to wield power over all men.

  That was the real secret behind his reason for wanting to destroy Kronweld. The Seekers of Kronweld were rivals to his power. Not that there was much danger of them discovering the Gateway and challenging the Statists without the influence of the pinnacle, but their mere existence in an alien plane was a challenge to his powers. The Director’s motive was to destroy any superior power anywhere in the universe whether it encroached upon his domain or not.

  Ketan felt a chill in the face of such an insatiable lust for power.

  “What have you done with the others you captured of those who came through?”

  “We haven’t kept count of the number,” said the Director. “We killed some of them outright. Some of them are still alive in planes adjacent to Kronweld. I take a look at them once in a while. They are quite ingenious. One of them is living in a world where space itself is tangible. Quite a curious existence he’s leading there.

  “But I’m becoming tired now. What’s left of this body tires easily. Bocknor and Javins will take care of you now. Have a pleasant journey. Good-by.”

  As if at a signal, Ketan’s arms were grasped roughly by the two Statists and he was spun about and out of the room.

  Silently, they went out and down a long, dim corridor where even their footsteps were soundless and muffled. Ketan glanced at his guards.

  “I should think you would grow tired of being ruled by that—machine.

  Bocknor confirmed Ketan’s suspicions about the relationship between himself and the Director. “It won’t be for long,” he said. “Spend your sympathy on yourself.”

  His hand suddenly released Ketan’s arm and Ketan looked back and up, quickly.

  Bocknor’s arm was drawn back, with a sharp, pointed knife gleaming in his hand. Ketan dropped to the floor, doubling over, and seized the fat man’s leg near the ankle. He jerked hard and twisted at the same time. He felt the knife part the fiber of his leather shirt.

  Javins let out a savage bellow of rage and kicked the knife from Bocknor’s hand, at the same time seizing Ketan’s arm in a vicious twist as Ketan was about to spring away.

  “You fool … you fool!” Javins raged. “Why did you try that?”

  “He’s too dangerous. I want him dead.”

  .“You’ll do as the Director says— as long as lie’s alive.”

  “He would never know. We’d tell him the prisoner started a fight and we had to kill him.”

  “Won’t you ever learn? Don’t you think the Director is looking at us and hearing what we say right now ?”

  In sudden, overwhelming fear, Bocknor whirled and looked nervously about.

  “You can’t see him,” Javins reminded needlessly, “but he can see you. Come on.”

  They started again. Ketan felt a curious mixture of elation and despair. Elation because it was going to be so easy to return to Kronweld after all. Despair because of the tremendously greater , opposition facing him than he had realized before.

  The Director had prophesied failure of any attempt to appeal to the people of Kronweld. That was partly in agreement with the argument Elta had used. Ketan had thought it would be so simple once he returned with the story of Earth and Kronweld’s heritage. Now he was beginning to be uncertain of himself. The S
tatists had taken the books and evidences he had hoped to take back. All he would have would be himself and his incredible story. Could he make them believe it?

  They would have to believe it. He would make them, somehow.

  The corridor ended abruptly. There was a sudden tenseness visible in both the Statists as they approached it, as if they were half fearful of the powers they were about to face.

  They paused for a moment at the blank door that barred their progress. Then, with a quick motion, Bocknor flung open the door and they shoved Ketan through. He heard the door lock behind him.

  As if staring at a sudden nightmare brought to life, he looked out upon the scene before him. A concourse of staring faces looked up. It was like the brief vision he had had from the niche in the Temple of Birth. They were staring, pleading, with desperate anxiety on their faces. They made no sound, but the hundreds of pairs of eyes were upon him.

  He was standing a little above them at the top of a flight of terrace-like steps that ended at the shelflike altar upon which he stood. Below, in the depths under those terraces he could feel the hum and vibration of the power that surged through the machine. He realized that all this vast protuberance of altar and steps and giant, shining electrodes about him was the Selector itself.

  The dome of the building threw out a pale light that fell upon the dispirited crowd. Apparently the people had been prepared for somthing, for there was pity, too, upon their faces.

  All this he caught in a glance that took no more than a fraction of a second before he heard the sound of confusion far to the rear. At the same instant he saw the motion of a fearful backward glance from someone in the front, near the Selector.

  Then the figure turned and he stifled a cry.

  Elta was there. Her anxious eyes glanced from the altar to the rear of the building and back to Ketan.

  She was wearing a long, shrouding cloak that almost hid her from head to foot. One hand was held inside the folds of the cloak and he knew almost before she drew it out what she held in there.

  A sudden blast of sound filled the hall and became a voice that thundered, “The judgment of the Director—oblivion!”

  At that moment the electrodes on either side began to glow and the scene grew vaporous as if beneath a thickening fog. It swirled crazily, and Ketan realized he had fallen to his knees.

  The fog began to glow in spots that gyrated in senseless patterns of light, growing faster and faster in pace until they blurred into streaks. He felt as if a mounting tension within space itself were about to tear him apart.

  Then dimly, through the mist and blinding lights, he saw the figure of Elta. The pursuers, who had created the disturbance at the rear, were almost up to. her now. She drew her hand out of the cloak and Ketan recognized the form of a Dark Land weapon.

  From its nose there crashed a beam of light, and below him there appeared a bright spot of fire that raked across the terraces of the Selector. Sudden thunder of exploding equipment beneath shook the hall. The-valtar tipped crazily and Ketan cried out Elta’s name.

  Then the scene was gone and he was again in the cradle of space among the stars, alone with them in the realm where time had stopped forever, yet great suns were born and grew old and vanished in the quick fire of novae, all in an instant.

  XXIII.

  There was soft music in the night and perfume wafted upon the air. In the black sky above, purple shadows and lights leaped and fluttered, and trembling, elusive pinpoints of starlight showed momentarily.

  Ketan lay upon his back, eyes staring up at that familiar but alien sky. Beneath him was a carpet of soft grass, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the gleaming white curve of a huge hemispherical surface that arced up until a curtain of blackness cut it off.

  The air was warm and a sharp, familiar pungency came to his nostrils. The winds were blowing in from Fire Land tonight, he thought.

  He sat up, sick with the memory of that last instant that he remembered, the vision of Elta spraying the Selector with a flaming knife that cut into the heart of the eternal machine.

  He remembered that last moment of falling terror when he plunged down from the shattered altar towards the pool of flaming metal that marked the path of her beam.

  But the Selector had acted an instant before its destruction, he knew. It had opened the Gateway and flung him through, beyond the meaningless eras, and beyond the gaps of space that separated the worlds.

  And now that Gateway was closed.

  Forever.

  Elta had succeeded in her insane scheme of cutting off the worlds from each other, and he had failed in the mighty commission of the pinnacle to bring the worlds together.

  There was no purpose in his being in Kronweld now. He may as well have remained in Danfer and perished in the ruins of the Selector.

  He tried to force himself not to think of Elta’s fate. He knew what it would surely be. He had seen those minions of the Director nearly upon her as she pressed the trigger that flamed the Selector. Even at this moment, they would be bearing her back to the Director and that withered travesty of a human being would pronounce a sentence worse than death upon her. There would be no satisfaction to the Director that Kronweld was cut off and would die of its own sterility. To demonstrate his power, he had to destroy it with his own hand.

  The weaving curtains of light flared in the sky for an instant and Ketan caught a half lit picture of all the white city with its columns and towers of shining marble. It was like a scene upon Earth in the light of a red and purple moon.

  He wondered if Anetel knew. He looked towards the glistening Temple of Birth from whence the soft music came. He wondered why he had not come into the Chamber of Birth. Probably it was due to the distortion of the Gateway caiised by Elta’s burning of the Selector.

  Probably no indication had come to the Ladies of the Temple of the change that had taken place. They would continue to wait inside the bleak Chamber of Birth, but no more would rejected infants of Earth come to them.

  They had been alarmed by the decreasing number that had appeared during the last few tara. How great would be their panic as the days lengthened into tara now and none at all appeared. Ketan wondered who the last man would be, the last man to live and die in this world of the dead.

  But as he lay on the grass with these morbid thoughts filling his mind he knew somehow that they were all wrong. Kronweld could not die so easily. Perhaps some way could be found to overcome the sterility that seized them all. If they could be persuaded to go into Dark Land, there was a chance that like the Bors—

  There was a better thought: Why could they not build a machine that would open the Gateway from this side? If the scientists of Richard Simons’ day had been able to create it in the first place, the Seekers of Kronweld should be able to duplicate the machine.

  He rose to his feet. His ultimate goal was the same, only one more obstacle had been put in his way, he told himself.

  There was just a single moment when he looked into the tara to come and thought of Elta. It brought bleakness, unmatched by the darkness and the cold winds of Dark Land. He forced it out of his mind. There was only the present, and that all-important goal to which it would lead.

  He walked towards the roadway that circled in front of the Temple. As he neared, he realized his additional predicament. He was behind the purple, lethal line that completely inclosed the Temple and cut it off from the city.

  He stood before it, staring down, when he heard a sudden exclamation nearby. He looked up to see a pair of Seekers in the roadway, standing in open-mouthed astonishment.

  “How did you get in there?”

  Before Ketan could answer, the second man exclaimed, “I know you I You are Ketan who desecrated the Temple. But -they said you were dead.”

  “Pm not, you see.”

  The uniqueness of the situation inspired him. It could be a wedge between the people of Kronweld and their stifling superstitions if he took advantage of it.

  “I have
been through the Edge into the realm of the God. I have come back to tell you what is there and where we have come from.” They backed in fear at his blasphemy. “The Servicemen will take care of him,” the first man whispered hoarsely.

  “Yes, tell the Servicemen,” said Keten. “Tell all of Kronweld. Tell the people what you have seen and bring them here. Let them see how I am yet unharmed by the wrath of the God whom I have desecrated. Go and tell them I have a message for them.”

  They turned and ran. Probably they would get the nearest Serviceman, but that didn’t matter, he thought. His story must spread, and anyone would do.

  The Council and the First Group would still attempt to suppress his message, but the populace were Seekers, men and women who could understand the truth of his words, once their eyes were opened to the falsity of their inhibitions. It was these who must hear him.

  He saw the first of the gathering crowd in the streets leading to the Temple. They were led by the two excited and exclaiming Seekers who had found him.

  They crept closer. In the vanguard were a half dozen Servicemen, and all came slowly, with a queer sort of awe as if he had come back from the dead.

  Ketan stepped back from the line, and the crowd flung questions at him which he left unanswered until there were too many for his voice to reach. The news was spreading swiftly.

  “Seekers of Kronweld!” he cried suddenly. They bccame silent, their voice of anger dying away in ripples.

  “You see me here,” he said, “and wonder how I am yet alive after I have crossed the forbidden line and entered the Temple and found the secrets of it.

  “Yes, I have been in there. I have seen what takes place. Do you want to know what is there? Do you want to know where we came from ?”

  He paused, feeling the spontaneous wave of shocks that emanated from the crowd. He waited for someone to speak. But no one spoke. They only continued to stare in horror.

  He looked about. He looked into their faces and saw that he had not gained a grip on a single mind.