CHAPTER III
The World That Couldn’t Be
Miller sat down on a rock and held his head in his hands. His thoughts were swimming. Cold, fresh air blew against his cheeks and he raised his face to meet that satisfying chill. It seemed to rouse him. He began to realize that he had been half asleep during the interview with Tsi, as though the mists of his slumber had still blanketed his senses. Otherwise he would scarcely have accepted this miraculous business.
Or was there another reason?
He felt a desperate impulse to see Tsi again. She could answer his questions, if she would. And she had been the first friendly face he had seen in this terribly strange land.
He looked up and willed himself to rise.
Impossible, of course. My own bootstraps, he thought, with a wild sort of amusement. Were his feet pressing less heavily on the rock beneath him?
And then, from above, came a high, thin laughter that was not truly audible—Brann!
Even before the mental voice came, that malicious, slow thought sent its familiar radiations before it. Something as recognizable as sound or color—more so!—fell down the cliff and crept coldly into Miller’s brain. He knew that unheard voice.
“You had better not come up,” it said.
Miller stood motionless, waiting. Instinctively he had fallen into the fighter’s crouch. But how useless ordinary precautions would be against this super-being!
He tried to close his mind.
“Go to Orelle, then,” it said. “I’ve made my bargain with Tsi and I’ll keep it. But she’s a fool. She always tries to close her mind to unpleasant things. She’ll never really admit we’re at war with her sister. As long as she doesn’t name it war, she thinks it’s something else.”
Again the high laughter.
“Go to Orelle,” Brann said. “I’m winning too easily. Perhaps they can use another fighter. Then they may be able to give me more of a battle. Though, if I chose, I could crush you with a thought—turn the air itself into a weight that would flatten you in an instant. But Orelle may think of a use for you. I can’t, except to divert myself with your reactions to certain experiments.”
The unheard voice grew carelessly casual.
“Too easy a victory is no victory at all. Go away.”
Anger stirred in Miller at that calm assumption of superiority. Brann was thoroughly justified, of course, yet no man likes to be discounted utterly. With all his power Miller willed himself to rise, to float upward as easily as he had floated down—and this time he was certain that his feet lost contact with the earth.
Then a weight like a great stone crushed down on him. Only for an instant did that frightful, unbearable pressure continue, while the veins swelled on Miller’s forehead and he heard his breath coming in deep, rasping gasps as he tried to resist the onslaught.
He went to his knees—down till he lay on his back, prostrate, helpless beneath that furious assault of the air itself. A screaming river of wind thundered down and the thin bushes in the gorge stirred and small landslides began as the air-river rushed in hurricane force from above.
Brann laughed idly again and obviously lost interest. The pressure vanished. Sweating, breathing hard, Miller struggled to his feet. He did not try teleportation again. For a moment he stared up at the cliff-rim. Then he turned and began to walk up the gorge in the direction of Orelle’s palace. His mouth was thin and his eyes held an angry glow.
So Brann was winning too easily. Well—perhaps something could be done about that!
Far off across the glimmering valley a green hillside rolled high against the sky. The diamond twinkle that was the castle he must reach grew larger as he walked—grew larger with abnormal speed. Miller looked down and was surprised to find that measured by the pebbles and the flowers underfoot he was taking increasingly long steps.
Seven-league boots, he thought, as he found himself striding like a giant through the softness of the grass. The earth slid by beneath his feet with dream-like fluidity. Now the diamond glitter of Orelle’s palace was dividing into hundreds of tinier glitters and he saw the walls of pale-colored glass rising fantastically upon the green height of the grass-clad mountain. A palace of glass—or ice.
“Ice,” he thought suddenly. “Ice and snow and rocks. That’s all there is here. This is a dream. There’s no such world—there couldn’t be.”
And then reason, stirring in his mind, argued, “Why not? How do we know the limits of possibility? Out of the few simple building blocks of the universe—out of neutrons, protons, electrons—everything we know is made. How much else may there be we can’t even perceive—unless transmutation takes place and the structure of a man’s nuclear patterns change to let him see. . . .
“After all, you aren’t the first. There was Van Hornung and who knows how many before him? There was Tannhauser in the magical mountain of Venusburg—there was Thomas the Rhymer under the hill in fairyland. Paradise itself sounds like a distorted tale of just such a land as this. Legend remembers. You aren’t in any new world. You’re only exploring a very old one, and—”
Without warning the world dropped away under his feet and all logical progression of thoughts ceased abruptly. The sky was beneath him now and the shining world whirling dizzily over and over around him. But something firmer than gravity clasped him close so that there was no vertigo, even though the earth had forsaken him. Green translucence cradled him. There was a sensation of great speed, and then—
Glass walls flashed past, spun, righted themselves gently. A solid pavement fitted itself against his soles and leveled off to the horizontal. He stood in a small, high room whose walls were row upon row of lenses, like bull’s-eye panes, all looking down upon him with—eyes? Black mechanical pupils that moved whenever he moved, following him as he walked toward the nearest wall. For an instant he felt stripped and naked under that multiple scrutiny.
Then a telepathic voice said, “You come from Brann.”
Miller looked around wildly. He was alone. Almost automatically he said, “No!” aloud, so that the air shivered to the harsh sound. He wasn’t sure why he denied it. Brann had spoken of war.
“Don’t lie,” the voice said coldly. “I can see the dust of Brann’s mountain on you. Do you think we can’t identify a simple thing like dust from a given mountain? It streams off you like purple light in the fluorescents. You come from Brann. Are you a spy?”
“Tsi sent me,” Miller said. “Take me to Orelle.”
“Orelle speaks,” the telepathic voice told him without emotion. “My sister loves me—but Tsi is no woman to trust. No one on Brann’s mountain is worth trusting or he wouldn’t be with Brann at all. What Tsi finds distasteful she denies existence. What do you want here?”
Miller hesitated, glancing around the walls at the impassive, watching eyes of the—machines? Power, he wanted to say. Give me that power-source and I’ll go. But he was silent, remembering Tsi’s warning.
How much of it he could believe he didn’t know now but it was second nature for him to keep his own counsel until he was sure enough to act. Orelle could not read his mind. Tsi had confessed that would be impossible once he began to master telepathic communication. He would be safe enough as long as he could give the right answers.
“I’m from the outside,” he offered hesitantly, thinking that hesitation and uncertainty might be his best defense until he learned more about this place. Exaggerate them, play up even more than was really genuine his bewilderment and confusion. “I—Tsi said you’d help me get oriented here.”
The disembodied voice was silent for a brief, considering moment. Then it said, “I think you lie. However—are you willing to accept our search? Only after you’ve been proved weaponless can we admit you here.”
What could he say but yes? For an instant he remembered the watch Tsi had strapped to his wrist and what she had said of it. But it was for communication only—she had said—and surely she knew that a routine search would probably be made. She wouldn’t have branded him with something that would give him away to the first inspection. Or would she? What he had heard of Tsi did little to increase his confidence in her. Still . . .
“Search if you like,” he said.
The room went dark. Miller, blinking in the sudden blindness, felt something like the vertigo he had not suffered in flight seize him relentlessly now he was on solid flooring. The air spun around him in a shrill diminishing vortex and it seemed to him limitless gulfs were opening underfoot and sucking him down, tight, tight, into a crushing spiral of darkness. . . .
Out of the dark lights suddenly sprang into being, cold, blue lights that struck him like cold water—struck and penetrated. Looking down, he was aghast to see his own blood coursing red through transparent veins, to see his bones stand out cleanly white in their lacings of muscle, moving startlingly when he bent to stare.
The lights went out again. The darkness ceased to whirl. And then for one instant he felt all through his body an indescribable shifting, a terrible motion of inconceivable multiplicity. And in that flash of the instant he was changed.
The atoms went back into their normal pattern. That unstable isotope which was himself shed its changed form and he was as he had always been, solid, human, normal.
It was a hideous feeling. Until that moment he had not realized how much he had changed already, what nascent, nameless senses had begun to open up in him, pushing back horizons upon glories beyond glories. It was like deafness and blindness suddenly closing in about a normal man. It was worse—it was like having all the properties of death itself imposed upon the living. Miller held his breath, closed his eyes.
He felt the shift again as the isotope form renewed itself within him. The shifting stirred in the unthinkable myriads of the nuclei that formed him. He was whole again.
Once more the vortex whirled and roared in darkness. Then the dark lifted and he was standing beside a bank of thick yellow flowers under an arched vault of glass. The floor was tiled in brilliant colors, resilient to the foot. The flowery bank rising from it might be real earth and flowers or it might be a skillful imitation. For it was also a divan.
Orelle lay upon it, smiling at him. He knew it was Orelle. He was aware, though he could not have explained how, of the telepathic emanation from her mind to his, individual as the pattern of the brain. She was beautiful—as everyone in this world seemed beautiful.
He saw something of Tsi’s features in hers but she was not dressed with the extravagance her sister affected. She was very slender, and her graceful body was sheathed tightly in something like clear satin that covered her to the wrists and ankles and flowed in long smooth lines over the flowers she lay on. She was pulling them idly and twirling the blossoms between her fingers.
“Well, you are welcome,” she said, almost reluctantly, eyeing Miller with a smile that had wryness in it. “We found no weapons, though we searched you down to the very structure of the protons. To tell you the truth, we have no reason to trust you.
“But Tsi must have had some reason for sending you here and I think we’re safer coping with her schemes at first hand than goading her on to try something more subtle still. Be sure you’re watched, my friend. Be careful what you do.”
Miller said wryly, “I’m not likely to do anything. From what I’ve seen of this place, I feel helpless. Do you all have the same powers as Tsi? How many of you are there? And what—”
Orelle shrugged. “We’re not used to hurry. Of course we have all the time we need. Your race doesn’t—even here. I can see your curiosity. And I’ll satisfy it, too. Yes, everyone here has the same powers, though naturally some are stronger than others. There is the telepathic factor, and—other things.”
“Bred into your race? But what about me? I’m not your kind.”
She said slowly, “A million years ago your ancestors were, though. Since then your people have gone down. It took eons to reach the peak when Atlantis and Mu were great cultures, and it will take eons more for your race to regain what they have lost. Only here, on this secret mountain, have we retained the strength of the old civilizations.”
Miller said. “But what happened?”
“Oh, the usual thing. Men took weapons they weren’t ready to use. In that time—try to understand this—the atomic structure of the world itself was different. You know that? That the atom can change—”
“I do indeed,” Miller told her grimly. “If electrons change, or if the nucleus changes, the structure changes too.”
She said, “Well, that was what happened. All earth is dull and dead now. Only here does the old special type of matter still exist. It throws off a certain radiation that makes it possible for us to be born and live as we are. In Atlantis there was experiment with nuclear structures, and transmutation.”
“We have atomic power now,” Miller said.
“The beginnings of it. You’re merely beginning. It will be a long, long time before you stand where Atlantis once stood. First you must change the very structure of your world! Only then will you change, will the radiation-caused mutation alter you and give you the powers and senses you lost when a world went to war a millennium ago.
“The fires of matter itself moved across the planet, and where it passed, structure altered and what was bright and shining and glorious became a dull, empty thing. Men lost their specialized, hard-won powers then. But the seeds remain latent in their bodies, recessive characteristics. Here, on the mountain, the recessive can become dominant for a little while. It is unstable, of course. . . .”
“Then—I’m like you? Tsi told me but I couldn’t believe it. I’m a—a sort of superman?”
“Every gift has its price,” she said oddly. “There is beauty here but there is terror too. You must have noticed that you see with clearer eyes—the eyes of the mind.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed that. Things are—shining, somehow.”
“It would be well if you remembered your own world,” Orelle said, after a little pause. Her eyes were troubled. “Your own atomic structure has altered but that can take place only once.”
A man came into view through a glassy wall that melted at his approach, and solidified again behind him. He looked no older than Orelle, a firm-fleshed, smiling man whose vari-tinted hair lay smoothly across his scalp. But his eyes were old, grey and cloudy with the mists of incalculable centuries.