I stopped listening along about then. For the box was slowly opening.
It opened like a jewel. Or like an unfolding flower that had as many facets as a jewel. I had expected a lid to lift but nothing of the sort happened. There was movement. There were facets and planes sliding and shifting and turning as though hinged, but what had seemed to be a box changed and reassembled and unfolded before me until it was – what? As much a jewel as anything. Angles, planes, a shape and a shining.
Simultaneously there was motion in my own mind. As a tuning fork responds to a struck note, so something like a vibration bridged the gap between the box and my brain. As a book opens, as leaves turn, a book opened and leaves turned in my mind.
All time compressed itself into that blinding second. There was a shifting reorientation, motions infinitely fast that fitted and meshed with such precision the book and my mind were one.
The Record opened itself inside my brain. Complete, whole, a history and a vision, it hung for that one instant lucid and detailed in my mind. And for that moment outside time I did comprehend. But the mind could not retain it all. It flashed out and burned along my nerves and then it faded and was only a pulse, a glimpse, hanging on like an after-image in my memory. I had seen – and forgotten.
But I had not forgotten everything.
Across a gulf of inconceivable eons a Face looked at me from red sky and empty earth. The Face of Ea ...
The room spun around me.
"Here," Dr. Essen's voice murmured at my shoulder. I looked up dizzily, took the glass of brandy she offered. I'm not sure now whether or not I had a moment of unconsciousness. I know my eyes blurred and the room tilted before me. I drank the brandy gratefully.
3. THE VISION OF TIME
De Kalb said, Tell us what you saw."
"You – you've seen it too?" The brandy helped but I wasn't yet steady. I didn't want to talk about what had flashed through my mind in that unending, dissolving glimpse which was slipping fragment by fragment out of my memory as I sat there. And yet I did want to talk.
"I've seen it," De Kalb's ponderous nod was grim. "Letta Essen has seen it. Now you. Three of us. We all get the same thing and yet – details differ. Three witnesses to the same scene tell three different stories. Each sees with a different brain. Tell us how it seemed to you."
I swirled the brand around in my glass. My thoughts swirled with it, hot and potent as the liquor and as volatile. Give me ten minutes more, I thought, and they'll evaporate.
"Red sky," I said slowly. "Empty landscape. And – " The word stuck in my throat. I couldn't name it.
"The Face," De Kalb supplied impatiently. "Yes, I know. Go on."
"The Face of Ea," I said. "How do I know its name? Ea and time – time – " Suddenly the brandy splashed across my hand. I was shaking with reaction so violent I could not control it and I was shaking because of time. I got the glass to my lips, using both hands, and drained what was left.
The second reaction passed and I thought I had myself under control.
"Time," I said deliberately, letting the thought of it pour through my mind in a long, cold, dark-colored tide that had no motion. Time hasn't, of course. But when you see it as I did, at first the concept makes the brain rock in your skull.
"Time – ahead of our time. Uncountable thousands of years in our future. It was all there, wasn't it? The civilizations rising and falling one after another until – the last city of all. The City of the Face."
"You saw it was a city?" De Kalb leaned forward quickly. "That's good. That's very good. It took me three times to find that out."
"It didn't see it. I – I just knew."
I closed my eyes. Before me the empty landscape floated, dark, almost night, under the dim red sky.
I knew the Face was enormous. The side of some mountain had been carved away to reveal it and, I supposed, carved with tools by human hands. But you had the feeling that the Face must always have been there, that one day it had wakened in the rock and given one great grimace of impatience and the mountainside had sloughed away from its features, leaving Ea to look out into eternity over the red night of the world.
"There are people inside," I said. "I could feel them, being there. Feel their thoughts, I suppose. People in an enormous city, a metropolis behind the Face."
"Not a metropolis," De Kalb said. "A nekropolis. There's a difference. But – yes, it's a city."
"Streets," I said dreamily, sniffing the empty glass. "Levels of homes and public buildings. People moving, living, thinking. What do you mean, nekropolis?"
"Tell you later. Go on."
"I wish I could. It's fading." I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features.
"Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?"
"A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny – and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand."
"But – the future!" I said. "That box – didn't you say it was found in Crete? Dug up in old ruins? How could something from the past be a record of our own future? It doesn't make sense."
"Very little makes sense, sir, when you come to examine the nature of time." De Kalb's voice was ponderous again. He heaved himself up a little and folded his thick fingers, looking at me above them with veiled gray eyes.
"Have you read Spengler, Mr. Cortland?" he asked.
I grimaced and nodded.
"I know, I know. He has a high irritant value. But the man had genius, just the same. His concept of the community, moving through its course from 'culture' to dead and petrifying 'civilization' is what happened to the city of the Face.
"I said 'happened' because I have to use the past tense for that nekropolis of the future. It exists. It has accomplished itself in time as fully as Babylon or Rome. And the men in it are not men at all in the sense we know. They are gods."
He looked at me as if he expected me to object. I said nothing.
"They are gods," He went on. "Spengler was wrong, of course, in thinking of any human progress in one simple, romantic curve. You have only to compare fourteenth century Rome with sixteenth century Rome to see that a nekropolis, as Mumford calls it, can pull itself together and become a metropolis again, a living, vital unit in human culture.
"I have no quarrel with Spengler in his interpretations of a culture within itself. But both he and Toynbee went astray in their ideas of the symbolic value of a city. When you go further into the Record you'll see what I mean."
He paused, put out a large hand and fumbled in a dish of fruit on the table at his elbow. He found an orange and peered at it dubiously, hefted it once or twice, then closed his fingers over it and went on with his discourse.
"In a moment," he said, "I want to show you something with this orange as an illustration. First, however, I must do Spengler the justice of allowing the validity of his theories, in the ultimate. The City of the Face has run its course. It is a nekropolis, in the sense that Mumford uses the term.
"In our times, a nekropolis such as Rome once was, and such as New York must be someday, needn't mean the end of our civilization, because a city isn't a whole nation. There were outlying villages that flourished all the better when Rome ceased to dominate their world. When the dark ages closed over Europe it wasn't by any means the end of the civilized world – elsewhere on the planet new cultures were rising and old ones flourishing. But the City of the Face is a very different matter.