I could not move. Every nerve in my body felt burned out, short-circuited. I could see and hear a little; that was all. I saw Belem clambering up into the hollow side of the huge piston.
In a moment he appeared behind Paynter. Paynter, I thought, tried to move. His stare broke away from mine. But the Mechandroid’s hands darted out, touching Paynter’s neck, his head, his spine. Belem spoke a word and took Paynter’s shoulder as the latter rose.
Belem’s quicksilver eyes were no longer within my mind, I realized.
But I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had forgotten the armored soldiers.
Now I saw them. They were quite dead, all of them. I saw how they had died. I remembered the chain of bursting explosions as the killing shadow had swept down from above.
It was gone now—but it had fed well.
Belem and the silent obedient figure of Paynter came toward me. I felt the Mechandroid’s fingers reach out and probe deeply into my flesh. There was brief pain, then I could move again. But I still could not think very clearly. Belem seemed to be listening to a voice I couldn’t hear, He said, as if to himself, “There isn’t much time—“ and urged both of us forward. Now that I turned, I could see that the matter-transmission chamber at the other end of the room was empty. The crowding Mechandroids with their slowly waking Sleeper had gone. They had stepped, in so many instants, from this place to some other planet that might be anywhere at all in the immeasurable vastness of the Galaxy.
“Come,” Belem said and we moved toward the matter-transmitter.
The rusted metal walls shimmered around us, faded, vanished.
Across the depths of space the atoms that made us up dispersed, drew out, reintegrated again. Bright alloy plates shimmered into being. We had stepped again from one world to another.
Belem pushed the panel open. We stepped out—into a cavern of dusty rock.
On the floor at our feet a little glittering tree stood motionless, beside it a flat metal sheet with wire bars. Belem sighed with satisfaction.
“I didn’t think they could do it,” he said. “Word went out to one of us in the laboratories to get these things replaced but I didn’t really think—well, there just isn’t much time. Cortland, bring Paynter here, please.”
I obeyed, moving in a curious dreamlike state, the aftermath perhaps of that monstrous rapport with the slaying shadow. Belem was kneeling beside the barred device dial Dr. Essen had used to create the vibratory matrix that had isolated us from space.
“Useless,” he said. “As I half suspected.” I looked up at the enclosing walls of stone, beyond which my own home planet stretched. It was curiously comforting to know that the rock overhead and the rock underfoot were the native structure of Earth. Here, on this uneven floor, my own body had fallen to dust.
I wondered if the drifts in which our feet left prints had once been—
“This is the cave of the time-axis, then,” I said slowly. “And it’s no good. Not if you can’t work the machine Dr. Essen used. Is it too complicated even for you, Belem? I should have thought—”
“That isn’t the problem. It’s comparatively simple, really. The trouble amounts to personalized mental mutation. We could understand how a thing as simple as a Neanderthaler’s battle hammer worked but we couldn’t use it—we don’t have the same muscular training and balance. And mental habits are far more subtle.
“An invention, in practical application, fits its age and the people of that age. By studying this apparatus, I could work back to the basic principle and construct something similar that would operate in my hands. But only Dr. Essen could use the device that’s so completely hers. In effect it’s an extension of her mind. And we’re in a hurry. I’ve had to make other plans.”
He glanced toward the closed panel of the transmitter and before he had finished speaking, it began to open. I think there was some mental warning which Mechandroids could exchange over considerable distances. Belem put a restraining hand on my arm as a second Mechandroid stepped into the cavern. He came directly from some world of dust and wind, for his hair was wildly blown and a reddish dust shook from his garments as he moved. He carried very carefully in both hands a milky-white crystalline egg.
Without a word he came forward, put it in Belem’s hands and turned back to the transmitter. It sighed shut behind him and he was gone—back, perhaps, to the wind and dust of his unknown world.
Gingerly Belem laid the crystalline globe on the floor between the glass tree and the useless Essen device.
“This will do what has to be done,” he said, looking down at it. “Give us a temporary force-field. It doesn’t tap the basic cosmic energies as Dr. Essen’s does but I hope it will protect us long enough. After the second-stage Mechandroid wakes we’ll be safe. He can take over.”
“And do what?” I asked, a little rebelliously. “Keep us asleep, set up a matrix to guard us—sure. And then send us in to the future? Maybe I don’t want to go any more. What good could I do there alone? De Kalb’s gone. Dr. Essen’s gone. Even Murray would have been more help than nobody. As it is, I’d rather stay right here. It looks like an interesting world, what little I’ve managed to see of it. If you hadn’t interfered I think I could have got along very well with Paynter.”
“Except for one thing,” he said calmly. “You’re a carrier of the nekronic infection, as I think the People of the Face may have planned from the beginning. As a spur to prevent just what you’ve suggested.”
“Why are you going, then?” I demanded. “It has nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, it does have. Two things. First—I don’t know why I’m going. The order came and I must obey it.”
“From the second-stage Mechandroid?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes. The second reason is”—He looked up at me over his shoulder. He was kneeling to puzzle over the Essen machine, and gave me a sudden cool smile. “I go under orders,” he said. “You go because of the nekronic spur. Do you know why Paynter must go too?”
“Because you’ve got him hypnotized,” I said. “Why else?”
“Paynter is infected too.” I gaped at him.
“Of course he is. Why else did he fail to kill you when he knew the danger you carried wherever you went? But suppose he had killed you—and the murders went on? The authorities would have had to look further—they would have found Paynter himself. So long as you lived, you were the obvious scapegoat.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “It adds up. Is that the reason why he has to go with us? Does your second-stage age Mechandroid care about that?”
“Of course not.” Belem had turned from the mystifying Essen machine and was working carefully with the milky-crystal globe now, his large fingers moving over it with the same clumsy deftness I had watched so often in De Kalb’s identical fingers.
“Of course not. The real reason is very different. You’ve probably guessed it already. Do you not know, really, why you have trusted me so far? If your mind had put up any real opposition, I couldn’t have done all I did with it. Don’t you know why you and I must go on to the world of the Face together—as you first set out to do?”
I stood there in the dusty cavern, in perfect silence, not surprised to find that I was trembling a little as his metal eyes met mine. After a long time I said, very softly, in a shaken, questioning voice, “De Kalb—De Kalb?”
“I think so,” he said calmly. Then he reached out and with one finger stirred the heavy dust on the floor. He looked at me, smiling wryly. “De Kalb is there. De Kalb is that. But here—” He struck his head a light rap, “Here I think he still lives. Latent. In abeyance. But still here.”