"Insanity, maybe," said Gary. "Lord, I don't know. It's like nothing I ever ran across before.”
Caroline moved close to Gary.
"We're alone, Gary," she said. "The human race stands all alone. No other race has the balance that we have. Other races may be as great, but they do not have the balance. Look at the Engineers. Materialistic, mechanical to a point where they cannot think except along mechanistic lines. And the voice. It goes on the opposite tangent. No mechanics at all, just mentality. An overwhelming and an awful mentality. And the Hellhounds.
Savage killers. Bending every knowledge to the business of killing.
Egomaniacs who would destroy the universe to achieve their own supremacy.”
They stood silent, side by side. The great red sun was nearing the western horizon. The goblins scuttered through the mushrooms, chirping and hooting.
A disgusting thing, a couple of feet long, crawled out of the slimy waters of the bog, reared itself and stared at them, then lumbered around and slid into the water once again.
"I'll start a fire," said Gary. "Night will be coming soon. We'll have to keep the fire going once we get it started.
I only have a few matches.”
"Maybe we can eat the mushrooms," said Caroline. "Some of them may be poisonous," Gary told her. "We'll have to watch the goblins, eat what they eat. No absolute guarantee, of course, that what they eat wouldn't poison us, but it's the only way we have of knowing. We'll eat just a little at a time, only one of us eating…”
"The goblins! Do you think they will bother us?”
"Not likely," Gary told her, but he wasn't as confident as he made it sound.
They gathered a stack of the dried stems of the mushrooms and corded them against the night. Gary, carefully shielding the flame with a protecting hand, struck a match and started a small fire.
The sun had set and the stars were coming out in the hazy darkness of the sky… but stars they did not know.
They crouched by the fire, more for the companionship of its flames than for the heat it gave, and watched the stars grow brighter, listening to the chattering of the busy goblins in the mushrooms behind them.
"We'll need water," said Caroline.
Gary nodded. "We'll try filtering it. Lots of sand. Sand is a good filter.”
"You know," said Caroline, "I can't feel that this has happened to us. I keep thinking, pretty soon we'll wake up and it will be all right. It hasn't really happened. It…”
"Gary…" she gasped.
He jerked upright at the alarm in her tone.
Her hands were at her head, feeling of the braids of hair.
"It's there again!" she whispered. "The braid I cut off to make a bowstring. I cut it off and it was gone and it is there again!”
"Well, I'll be…" But he did not finish the sentence. For there, not more than a hundred feet away, was the ship… Tommy Evans' ship, the ship that the voice had destroyed in a single flash of fire. It sat on the sand sedately, with light pouring from its ports, with the shine of starlight on its plates.
"Caroline!" he shouted. "The ship! The ship!”
"Hurry," said the voice to them. "Hurry, before I change my mind. Hurry, before I go insane again.”
Gary reached down a hand and pulled Caroline to her feet.
"Come on," he shouted.
"Think of me as kindly as you can," said the voice. "Think of me as an old man, an old, old man, who is not quite the man he was… not quite the man he was.”
They ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the ship. "Hurry, hurry," the voice shouted at them. "I cannot trust myself.”
"Look!" cried Caroline. "Look, in the sky!”
The wheel of light was there, the slow, lazy wheel of light they first had seen on Pluto… the entrance to the space-time tunnel.
"I gave you back the ship," said the voice. "I gave you back the strand of hair. Think kindly of me please… think kindly…”
They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind them.
At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.
He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel that shimmered above them.
They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city, its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.
Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the tears that welled in Caroline's eyes and trickled down her cheeks.
"The poor thing," she said. "That poor old man back there.”
Chapter Sixteen
The city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately, battling valiantly to hold off the hordes of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant of the Engineer battle fleet still stood between it and complete destruction.
The proud towers were blasted into dust and the roadways and parks were sifted with the white cloud of destruction, the powdered masonry smashed and pulverized to drifting fragments by the disintegrator rays and the atomic bombs. Twisted bits of wreckage littered the chaotic wastes of shattered stone — wreckage of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.
Gary glanced skyward anxiously. "I hope they can hold them off," he said, "long enough for the energy to build up.”
Caroline straightened from the bank of instruments mounted upon the roof outside the laboratory.
"It's building up fast," she said. "I'm almost afraid. It might get out of control, you know. But we have to have enough energy to start with. If the first stroke doesn't utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won't have a second chance.”
Gary's mind ran over the hectic days of work, the mad scramble against time. He remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy had gone out to the edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim of space into a hump, curving the time-space continuum into a hypersphere that finally closed and divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.
It had taken power to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out of the magnetic power transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at hand for the making of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to "skin" a hypersphere, to turn it through a theoretical fifth dimension until it was of the stuff that the inter-space was made of — a place where time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a mystery region that was astonishingly easy to maneuver through space once it was created. It wasn't a sphere or a hypersphere — it was a strange dimension that apparently did not lend itself to measurement, or to definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.
But whatever it was, it hung there above the city, although there was no clue to its existence. It couldn't be seen or sensed — just something that had been created from equations supplied by the last man living out his final days on a dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried an irate letter from a creditor back on Earth who felt that he should have long since been paid. "Too long overdue," the letter had said. Gary grinned, Back on Earth the creditor undoubtedly still was sending him letters pointing out that the account was becoming longer overdue with the passing of each month.
Outside the universe that tiny, created hypersphere was bumping along, creating frictional stress, creating a condition for the creation of the mysterious energy of eternity — an energy that even now was pouring into the universe and being absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised above the city.