We drew up before a towering steel and plastic building. Topaz jumped briskly out of the car, took my hand confidently and led me into the low door before us. We had stepped straight into an elevator apparently, for a panel sighed shut behind us and I felt the familiar pressure underfoot and the displaced air that means a rapid rising up a shaft.
The panel opened. We stepped out into a small room similar to the one in which I had awakened.
“Now,” Topaz said with relief. “We’re here. You were very good and didn’t ask too many questions, so before we go I’ll show you something.”
She touched another button in the wall, and a plate of metal slid downward out of sight. There was thick glass behind it. Topaz fingered the button again and the glass slid down in turn. A gust of sweet-smelling air blew in upon us. I caught my breath and leaned forward to stare.
We were very high up in the city but we were looking out over a blossoming countryside, bright in the season of late spring. I saw meadows deep in grass and yellow flowers, far below. Streams winked in the bright, clear sunlight, here and there fruit-trees were in blossom. Bird-song rose and fell in the sunshine.
“This of course,” Topaz said, “is the world we live in. There’s only one museum.”
“Museum?” I echoed almost absently, “What museum?”
“The City. There’s only one. All machines and robots. Isn’t it horrible? They built like that, you know, back in barbarous times. We keep it in operation to show what it was like. That’s why they can’t blanket the noises altogether, it would spoil the effect. But no one lives here. Only students come sometimes. Our world is out there.”
“But where do people live?” I asked. “Not in—well, villages, communities?”
“Oh no. Not any more. Not since the dark ages. We have transmission now, you see, so we don’t need to live huddled up together.”
“Transmission?”
“This is a transmitter.” She waved at the room behind us. “That other place, where you woke, was a receiver.”
“Receiver of what? Transmitter of what?” I felt like Alice talking to the Caterpillar,
“Of matter, naturally. Much easier than walking.” She pressed the stud again and the glass and metal slid up to shut out that glowing springtime world. “Now,” she said, “We’ll go—wherever it is we’re going. I don’t know. Lord Paynter—”
“I know—the old fool.”
Topaz giggled. “Lord Paynter’s orders are already on record. In a moment we’ll see.” She did domething with the buttons on the wall. “Here we go,” she said.
Vertigo spun through my mind. The wailing of that ancient, wonderful, monstrous City died away.
11. Thirty Second Interlude
It was a little like going down fast in an elevator. I didn’t lose consciousness but the physical sensations of transmission were so bewildering and so disorienting that I might as well have been unconscious for all the details I could give—then or later—about what happens between transmitter and receiver. All I know is that for a while the walls shimmered around me and gravity seemed to let go abruptly inside my body, so that I was briefly very dizzy.
Then, without any perceptible spatial change at all, the walls suddenly steadied and were not translucent pale gray any more, but hard dull steel, with the rivets showing where plates overlapped and here and there a streak of rust. I was in a somewhat smaller room than before. And I was alone.
“Topaz?” I said tentatively, looking around for her. “Topaz?” And then, more loudly, “Dr. Essen—where are you?”
No answer, except for the echo of my voice from those dull rusty walls.
This time it was harder to take, I don’t know why. Maybe things like that are cumulative. It was the second time I’d taken a jump into the unknown, piloted by somebody who was supposed to know the angles, and come out at the far end alone and in the wrong place.
I looked at the walls and fought down sheer panic at the possibility that this time I had really gone astray in the time-dimension and wakened here in the same room from which I’d set out in the City museum, a room now so aged that the wall surfaces had worn away and the exposed steel corroded and only I remained alive and imprisoned in a dead world.
It was a bad moment.
I had to do something to disprove the idea. Obviously the one possible action was to get out of there. I took a long step toward the nearest wall—
And found myself staggering. Gravity had gone wrong again. I weighed too much. My knees were trying to buckle, as if the one step had put nearly double my weight upon them. I braced my legs and made it to the wall in wide, plodding steps, compensating in every muscle for that extraordinary downward pull.
The moment my hand touched the wall there was a noise of badly oiled hinges and a door slid back in the steel.
Now let me get this straight.
Everything that happened happened extremely fast. It was only later that I realized it, because I had no sense of being hurried. But in the next thirty seconds the most important thing that was to occur in that world, so far as I was concerned, took place with great speed and precision.
Through the opening came a cool dusty light and the sound of buzzing, soft and insistent. I guessed at anything and everything.
I stood on the threshold of an enormous room. It was braced, tremendously braced, with rusted and pitted girders so heavy they made me think of Karnak and the tremendous architecture of the Egyptians. In an intricate series of webs and meshes metal girders ran through the great room, catwalks, but perhaps not for human beings, since some were level while others tilted dizzily and on a few one would have had to walk upside-down. I noticed, though, that while most of the catwalks were rusted those on which a man could walk without slipping off were scuffed shiny.
There was a series of broad high windows all around the room. Through them I could see a city.
Topaz had said there were no cities in her civilization except for the Museum. Well, perhaps there weren’t. Perhaps I had plunged unknowingly into time again, and looked upon a city like that Museum, no longer preserved in dead perfection. This city was living and very old. An obsolete metropolis, perhaps a nekropolis in the sense De Kalb had used the term. Everywhere was decay, rust, broken buildings, dim lights.
The sky was black. But it was day outside, a strange, pallid day lit by bands of thin light that lay like a borealis across the dark heavens. Far off, bright but not blinding, a double sun turned in the blackness.
But there were people on the streets. My confidence came back a little at the sight of them, until I realized that something curious was taking place all through the city as I watched a strange, phantom-like flitting of figures—men flashing into sight and out again like apparitions in folklore. I stared, bewildered, for an instant, before I realized the answer.
Perhaps in a city of the future like this one I had expected vehicles or moving ways of endless belts. Now I saw that at intervals along the street were discs of dull metal set in the pavement. A man would step on one—and vanish. Another man would suddenly appear on another, step off and hurry toward a third disc.
It was matter-transmission, applied to the thoroughly practical use of quick transportation.
I saw other things in that one quick look about the city. I won’t detail them. The fact of the city itself is all that was important about that phase of my thirty seconds’ experience there.
There were two other important things. One was the activity going on in the enormous room itself. And the third was waiting almost at my elbow. But I’m taking these in the reverse order of their urgency.