" – Dr. Letta Essen –"
Only then did I turn my head. Kneeling beside the original force-field device was Topaz, her fingers flickering over its controls.
Not Topaz, I thought. Not now. The face was hers, and the body, but when she glanced up and smiled it was Letta Essen's keen gray eyes that met mine. Hypnosis had released her, as it had released Murray, from the prison of the alien bodies, the alien minds.
"Now I will join you," Belem said, and turned to face the spinning tree.
There was silence under the dome of gray light.
When the Mechandroid turned he was still a man-machine but it was De Kalb who looked at us out of the metal eyes. He smiled. "Goodbye to Belem," he said. "We're here again, all of us."
"But why did it happen – why?" Letta Essen spoke with the voice of Topaz but it was unmistakably her own mind framing the thought and the words.
"I think I can guess," De Kalb said, through Belem's lips. "It was no accident that stranded us temporarily in this era. We set out to fight a battle, the four of us against the nekron. Well, I think we have fought that battle. I think what happened was a testing-field in which each of us was tried and found – useful. Now we go on to the final battle."
"And the nekronic killer with us," I said.
"The killer too. That is part of the pattern, I think."
"But wait a minute," Murray said. "What's become of this fellow Paynter? Where's Belem? Where's Topaz? And Cortland, were you always yourself?"
"The others are recessive in our minds, I think," De Kalb said. "Just as once we were recessive in theirs. Cortland's alter ego has always been recessive. Only he hasn't changed – except in that he changed bodies, as we all did. Why that had to happen I don't know – yet. Remember, Cortland has always been our catalyst. When he enters the picture things happen!"
"There's one thing that isn't going to happen," I said. "We can't get our bodies back, can we? These we borrowed. Or stole, if you want the accurate truth. The real owners are sleeping, maybe. But will we ever dare sleep? Will we ever be sure well waken as ourselves? Each of us is a double mind in a single body now. If we come out alive from the world of the Face, what's going to happen then?"
"We'll know that," De Kalb said firmly, "when we wake again. We will sleep, Cortland. And whichever ego wakes at the end of the world will be the ego that was predestined to wake."
He hesitated briefly. "Now we must go," he said. "Look at the tree, Cortland. Murray, Letta – watch the tree. We will know the real truth – but later, much later – when we waken at the end of the world. When we look into the Face of Ea."
23. THE FACE
Time turned on and on upon its axis where we slept.
Time flowed like a river, wheeled like a sphere, moved like a galaxy through its own unimaginable dimensions toward its own inexorable ends. Motionless at the heart of motion, we slept on.
I think I dreamed.
Perhaps it was a dream in which the waters of time parted above us like a Red Sea parting and, through the walls of water, inquiring faces looked down into mine, mouthed words in unknown languages that came to me faintly from far away. If it was a dream, the dream wore thin for an interval and I could almost hear them, almost feel their hands on me, tugging me awake.
And then, among them, a deep serene powerful command seemed to break and through the parted waters of sleep and time I looked up dimly into the face I had last seen beneath the cocoon of fight, still in its natal slumber. But this time I saw the calm quicksilver eyes and heard the calm voice running deep with power.
The eyes met mine. Their command was irresistible, and the command was –
Sleep.
The waters closed over me again …
As dreams repeat themselves in interrupted slumber, it seemed to me that this dream returned. The quiet of turning time wore thin and I looked up again into inquisitive faces seen from far away, felt inquisitive hands plucking me awake. But these were strange faces, so strange I was startled a little out of my oblivion and all but sat up in my shock as I saw them.
Above the clustering misshapen heads the great calm figure of the Man-Machine loomed. I knew him by his eyes and by the deep humming tide of power that flowed from his mind to mine, silencing the chatter, healing over the breach in time. But I would not have known him, I think, except for that.
For long eons had passed in that measureless interval. The serene face was changing. But the tide of his command had not changed at all. He still said to me, "Sleep," and I slept again.
Once more the dream returned. This time it was not faces that looked down at me but small, sharp, twinkling lights, insistent, deeply troubling. And as I roused enough to turn my head aside, trying to escape them, I had one glimpse of quicksilver eyes beneath calm brows, one remote echo of a voice that rolled like thunder. The lights vanished like candle-flames in a hurricane.
The thunder was so deep that it had tangible volume, rolled from a tangible source. I knew how mighty the source was. I knew, from that glimpse of the quicksilver eyes, how tremendously they had changed. The Man-Machine was no longer the size and shape of man. The face had changed, the functions had changed, the size was too vast for my dazed mind to comprehend.
"Sleep," the thunder commanded through diminishing vistas of space and time. And this time I sank into depths so profound that no dreams could plumb them.
I had thought that, when the time came, I would have much to write about the Face of Ea, that stands in the twilight of the world's end. But now, when I try, the words are hard to find. I have seen things no human being ever saw before. But the paradox is that it can't be communicated. Between experience and inexperience lies a gulf that can be bridged in one way and one way only.
You would have to go, as we went, to time's end and stand before the Face of Ea. Then I could tell you what I saw – and then I wouldn't need to tell you, for you would know.
I awoke.
The long, long sleep drained slowly out of my mind, like water receding down a sloping beach, leaving me stranded in a place I had never seen before. This was the time-axis – but it had changed. I looked with blank eyes around the dome that closed us in, a thin, gray dome through which red light filtered. We were no longer underground. I suppose the mountains had worn away, grain by grain, while we slept.
Murray's was the first face I saw. I thought to myself, "Is it Murray this time or is it Paynter?" I watched him sit up on the gray floor, rubbing his face dazedly, his flesh pink in that filtering light. And I never knew whether it was Murray or Paynter.
Beyond him De Kalb looked at me with metallic eyes, smiled and sat up. And Topaz lifted her bright curls from the dusty floor and turned swiftly from face to face, a glance that combined Letta Essen and herself in indissoluble unison.
"Are we there?" she asked in a soft voice.
For answer I gestured toward the gray dome that shut us in, the world outside the dome.
As far as we could see, in every direction but one, the world lay flat and gray with a surface very familiar to us all in one way or another. A glazed grayness, solid, through which veins of rosy color, like curled hair, twined at random. The world was all nekronic matter now – except for one other thing.
We looked up at the Face of Ea, and we were silent.
As we looked, the dome above us shimmered, thinned, was gone. Down upon us the red twilight poured unbroken. It was faintly warm upon the skin. A very faint wind blew past us and I can remember still the strange hollow odors it carried, wholly unlike anything I had ever scented before from winds blowing over open country.