Something was happening on the far side of the room. It wasn’t easy to see, because of the distance and because a number of men in dark close-fitting garments clustered around it. I thought it might be an autopsy.
There was a table as high as an operating table and a man or a body lay stretched out on it. Above the table hung a web of thin, shining, tenuous matter that might have been lights or wires. It made me think, for no clear reason, of a complex chart of the neural system.
At the lower edge the bright lines appeared to connect with the object on the table. At the top they vanished into a maze of ceiling connections I couldn’t follow. Some of the wires, or lights, were brilliantly colored, others were silvery. Light and color flowed along them, coalesced at intersections, glowed dazzlingly and flowed on along diverse channels downward.
That was the thing of secondary importance which I saw there. The thing of primary importance stood about six feet away from me, waiting.
Now this is the difficult part. I must get it as clear as I can.
A tall man stood facing me. He had been standing there when the door opened. Obviously he expected me. He wore tight-fitting dark clothes like the others. He was well-made, even handsome, with the emotionless face of a Greek statue or a Buddha.
He was Ira De Kalb.
I had a moment of horrible internal vertigo, as if the bottom had dropped wholly out of my reason. It couldn’t be happening. For this was De Kalb and it wasn’t, exactly as Topaz had been Dr. Essen—and not Dr. Essen. In this case, at any rate, there was almost no physical difference. This man before me was the man I had last seen asleep in the cavern of the time-axis, no younger, no older, not changed at all except for one small thing.
The Ira De Kalb I had known possessed strange veiled eyes, filmed like a bird’s, grayed with light blue dullness. But this De Kalb, who regarded me with unrecognizing coldness, as if he had never seen me before in his life, looked out of curiously changed eyes.
His eyes were made of metal.
It was living metal, like burnished steel with depth behind it, yet not real steel—some alloy unknown to me, some bright unstable thing like quicksilver. I could see my own face reflected in the eyes, very small and vivid, and as my reflection moved, the eyes moved too.
I took a deep breath and opened my mouth to speak his name.
But I did not make a sound. There wasn’t time. He had been standing there with an immobility that was not human. An image of metal would stand like that, not seeming to breathe, no tiniest random motion stirring it. And I had an instant’s uncanny recollection that the De Kalb I knew had moved with curious clumsiness, like an automaton.
Then the metal eyes moved.
No, I moved.
It was a fall, in a way. But no fall I could accurately describe. It was motion of abnormal motor impulses, fantastic simply because they were without precedent. One walks, actually, in a succession of forward-falling movements, the legs automatically swinging forward to save one from collapse toward the center of gravity.
This was reaction to a sort of warped gravitational pull that drew me toward De Kalb. It was the opposite of paralysis—a new gravitation had appeared and I was falling toward it. It was like rushing down a steep slope, unable to halt oneself.
His strange, smooth face was expressionless but the metal eyes moved, watching me, reflecting my twin images that grew larger and larger as I fell upon him down a vertiginous abyss. The eyes came toward me with an effect of terrible hypnosis, probing into mine, stabbing through the reflection of my own face, my own eyes, and pinning the brain in my skull—probing into my mind and the little chamber behind the mind, where the ego lives.
Then he was looking out—through my own eyes! Deep in my brain the metal gaze crouched, looking watchfully outward, seeing what I saw.
A telepathic rapport? I couldn’t explain it. All I knew was the fact. De Kalb was a spy in my brain now.
I turned around. I went back toward the door into the transmission room. I closed the door. I was alone there. But the metal eyes looked at the room as I looked at it. I had no control over my motions while I saw my own hand rise and finger the wall. But when the room began to shimmer and the disorientation of matter-transmission shivered through my body I knew I had my muscles and my will back again. I was free to move as I liked. I was free to think and speak. But not about what had just happened. It may have been something like post-hypnotic command, to give it a label. That’s easy for me. Remember, I’d looked into De Kalb’s quicksilver eyes.
All this happened in something under thirty seconds. I’ve given you, of course, conclusions and afterthoughts that came to me much later, when I had time to think over what I’d seen and correlate it. But I woke in the rusted room, I looked out into a city on a planet outside our solar system, I saw something like an autopsy in a vast laboratory braced as if to withstand unearthly pressures, I met the gaze of Ira De Kalb and then the thing had happened between us—happened. And I returned to the transmitter.
The room vibrated and vanished.
12. The Swan Garden
Topaz squealed with sheer delight.
“Come on out!” she cried. “It’s the Swan Garden! What are you waiting for anyhow? I’ll take back all I ever said about Lord Paynter. Oh, do look, isn’t it wonderful here?”
Silently I stepped after her through the door.
So little actual time had elapsed that I don’t think she really missed me. Something had reached out through the matter-transmitter and intercepted one of us and let the other go on. But Topaz must have rushed out of the door the moment it opened and been too overcome with pleasure at finding herself just here to realize I was lagging behind.
And I—had I really been for a round-trip through a galaxy? Had I dreamed it? Was this whole interlude a dream while my own body slept in the time-axis, waiting for the world’s end? In preparation for that sleep I had begun to learn how to ignore time as a factor in our plans.
In this world, waking or sleeping, evidently I must learn to ignore space. Distance meant nothing here with the matter-transmitters functioning as they did. You could live on Centaurus and get your breakfast rolls fresh from a bakery in Chicago.
You could drop in on a friend on Sirius to borrow a book, simply because it might be easier than to walk around the corner for one. And in the annihilation of space, time too seemed to undergo a certain annihilation. Just as, in ignoring time, you could as a corollary overstep space.
I had overstepped reason too. I had come into a world where nothing made sense to me, where the people who had been my companions moved behind masks, stirred by motives that were gibberish. I had overstepped both space and time just now, and so compactly that the girl who called herself Topaz never missed me.
I was still too dazed to argue. I could control my own motions again but my mind had suffered too much bewilderment to function very well. I followed Topaz dumbly, staring about me at the remarkable landscape of the Swan Garden—knowing in some indescribable way that inside my mind other eyes stared too, impassive metal eyes that watched my thoughts as they watched the things around me.
Topaz spun around twice in sheer delight, her sun-colored veils flying. Then she ran her hands through her hair, dislodging a last sparkle or two, and, smiling at me over her shoulder, beckoned and hurried ahead through what seemed to be a wall of white lace.
A gentle breeze stirred it, shivering the folds together and I saw that we were following a narrow path through a grove of head-high growths like palmetto, except that the leaves and flowers were white, and shaped like enormous snow-flakes, each a perfect crystalline pattern and every one different from every other.