“That is probably humor,” Belem said coldly. “Wasted on a Mechandroid. I have no intention of telling you how I do this but there is no reason why you shouldn’t know where I am. Exactly where you saw me last. My body remains in stasis while my mind is in close rapport with yours.
“I can see and hear and feel everything you do. I can read your clearer thoughts. I can, with a great effort, control your motor reflexes for a brief time. Whether you like it or not your fate and mine are now linked until I can effect a separation again.”
“For better or worse!” I said wildly. “For richer or poorer—I see another orange coming along; shall we have one together?”
“Finish that purple fruit,” Belem ordered, “You may need another. I am going to take you through the transmitter now to a certain underground region whose existence we have suspected for a long while. I learned its location during your rapport with Paynter.
“It is a highly secret place but together I believe we can enter it and perform an important task. I believe it will in the end be as important to you as to us. In some way none of us yet understands your destiny and mine are linked through that time-axis where we both have slept. We—”
“Don’t forget Paynter was there too,” I reminded him.
“I know. I’ve explored your memory along with Paynter. I know all the essentials now and I believe I begin to get a glimmer of the pattern. Our first task is to visit the Government Subterrane. If you will turn to the left now and go back along the path to the transmitter room—”
“Why should I?” I was feeling sullen as the exhilaration died in me. “This is my brain, not yours. I have my own problems. Go crawl into somebody else’s mind or do your own dirty work. I’m in enough of a jam right now with Paynter, or I will be when—”
“When he realizes that you are a carrier for the nekronic killer, exactly. Paynter will not hesitate to sacrifice you when the time comes. When it does you and I will be at a safe distance, with the object I mean to get in the Subterrane. Now will go or must I force you?”
I started to speak—aloud in my anger—but before the words could come there was a ripple of self-conscious laughter among the star-shaped leaves and Topaz swept forward through the fronds and spun around before me. She was covered with spangles, glittering, dazzling, flickering, all colors, clinging to her skin, her hair, her floating veils.
“Oh, how beautiful I am!” she caroled, with an air of innocent vainglory. “Tell me, did you ever see anything so beautiful before?”
“Never in my life,” I assured her. “It’s—” My jaw snapped shut on the last word. My muscles tightened and without the least conscious volition I found I had turned my back to her and was marching down the path toward the matter-transmitter. In my brain a cool, metallic mind seemed to be saying with an intonation of despair, “Human beings!”
It was interesting to watch my own hands manipulating the buttons that selected the proper wave-bands for our destination. The process looked far too simple—there were only half a dozen buttons in all—but I assumed the Mechandroid, gazing through my eyes, tightening and releasing my muscles, knew what he was doing.
He did. The room shimmered before me, disorientation and brief nausea shook us both together in gigantic oblivion and—
We emerged into a large underground concourse—I think it was underground; it sounded and felt like it—thronged with busy men and women who paid me only the slightest of glancing attention as I pushed among them, half guided now and half of my own volition. There were people here in costumes so various that I suppose my own clothing was no more outlandish than anyone else’s.
I think this was a nexus in the great web of matter-transmission, under the surface of what planet I have no idea.
People from colonies all over the Galaxy must have changed stations here. I know I attracted no attention as I hurried through the cosmopolitan crowd toward a row of transmission rooms in the center of the concourse, closed the door behind me, manipulated more buttons.
It was curious, I thought to myself as the familiar disorientation swam through my brain, how little I was seeing of this marvelous world of the middle future. Topaz had assured me that cities were obsolete and mankind lived in luxurious isolation wherever his fancy dictated.
Yet all I had seen so far, except for the Swan Garden, had been the underpinnings of the culture, the girders upon which its farming luxuries were builded. What lay above-ground, on the flowering surfaces of the planets, I was not to know, then or—perhaps—ever.
The room steadied about me. The door slid open.
I looked down a long corridor bathed in white light.
“This is the Subterrane,” Belem’s voice in my brain said.
17. The World of Belem
Had I been expecting something semi-miraculous I should have been disappointed. I had seen similar passages under Grand Central Station. Here there was nothing at all unusual—simply a white corridor, empty and silent.
“In your day,” the Mechandroid told me, “this would have been a grouping of thick doors and locks. The Subterrane is the arsenal of the government. It isn’t on Earth. Walk forward.”
I obeyed. I felt a brief tingling, a rather pleasant vibration that passed and was gone.
“You have just passed between a cathode and anode that would have disrupted the brain of any Mechandroid. The pattern is keyed so that it’s harmless to humans. No Mechandroid has ever been permitted in the Subterrane—till now.”
So they were vulnerable after all.
“Why, yes,” Belem remarked, surprised. “Every existing thing is capable of negation—of altering its condition to non-existence. The less adaptable an organism, the easier it is to destroy. But this cathode-anode device is not portable and its field is quite limited.
“It is useful only for defense—not for offense. You would be destroyed, too, if you hurled yourself on a sharpened stake. The other devices are aimed at human beings who aren’t wearing the protective helmets. Luckily—”
I wasn’t in a corridor any more. Not a normal corridor. Planar geometry had suddenly and empirically been disproved. My eyes, conditioned to normal perspective, went dizzily out of focus as abruptly as gravity itself seemed to alter.
You can’t describe the indescribable. Lines of perspective meet at the vanishing point—sure. So they say. But the walls and floor and ceiling of the white-lit tunnel curved in insanely a few feet ahead of me, crossed somehow and re-extended themselves toward me like a tapering cone. Such distortions of matter may be normal at the end of the universe but you shouldn’t be able to reach out and touch—Touch? But I couldn’t even do that. Gravity had gone wrong, too. I suspected there was a riptide in the semicircular canals of my ears. Because I felt that I was falling, no matter in what direction I looked.
There was no corridor. There was only white emptiness. Dead white and featureless except for the cone that pointed accusingly at me. I tried to move forward and a horrible, sick, giddiness loosened my muscles and then tightened them again as I strained to stand rigid. As long as I didn’t move an inch I might not fall.
“Walk forward!” the voice in my mind insisted. I shut my eyes and walked forward. At Belem’s annoyed command, I reopened them and either fell or ran toward the white cone that was the corridor itself extended beyond infinity and in geometric reversal. As I moved I found myself curving away, along the line of the distortion, so that without knowing how it had happened I was hurrying in the opposite direction with my back to the cone.