With a jolt I was halted, pressed back. The blind, featureless face of the Adversary loomed larger, blotting out half the white heavens. Back and back I fell—
And then suddenly there was support all around me, a merging of familiar minds with mine. It was deeper than the nearness I had felt before. We were drawn together, we four. Our minds touched and blended and became a single larger entity, a whole that yet preserved the individuality of us all. The cold clear thoughts of Belem and De Kalb lighted my mind like the facets of brilliance shot from a diamond. The blind white-hot violence of Murray and Paynter, the infinite resource that was Topaz and Letta Essen.
Now the Adversary shifted its grip. I felt it give a little before our combined pressure. And we seemed to be viewing it from several points at once—in time. Cross-bearings in time itself. But how?
I knew the answer very clearly, in one flash.
We were the chosen weapons, the doubly sharpened blade. That was why my own body and the bodies of the rest had crumbled into dust when the time-axis chamber was shattered. Two identical matrices can not exist in the same space-time, but two identical matrices had been necessary to forge this weapon that was ourselves.
No mind fixed and conditioned to one sector in time could pin down the nekron. It took a larger concept, a binocular view from two points in time. And the Face of Ea had doubled our striking power when it doubled our minds in bodies that were basically identical with the ones we wore when we were born.
We had fought this battle before in miniature. In the world of the middle future we had been tempered to this final task. The nekron was fixed and trapped here—it could no longer evade us through time. Our strangely multiple mind could fix and focus upon it.
But the battle was yet to come.
With reckless, single-minded violence that multiple mind smashed out at the nekronic Adversary. As Paynter had driven the metal ram no harder than he drove himself against the fortress barrier, as Harrison Murray had so often hurled himself in stubborn, blind fury against foes tangible and” intangible—so the weapon that was ourselves crashed against the black nekronic force striving to destroy us.
Somehow, somewhere, in some hidden weakness of ourselves, it sought and found a flaw. It drove us back. Its own incredible power smashed through warping channels of space and time at our welded minds.
If a single one of those inconceivable bolts of destruction had struck us it might have been the finish for us all. But none struck. For Topaz was part of the weapon which was ourselves and all Topaz’s memories of infinite cleverness, infinitely adaptable life—with Letta Essen’s cool, watchful mind to guide her.
Oh, Topaz was adaptable—that had been her purpose and her goal in society. She had incredible mental, emotional, muscular control and she reached instinctively, automatically to any outside threat. Now I saw her talents’ ultimate extension as—somehow, in a black star-blazing gulf that yet embodied the whole universe—we dodged and whirled and shifted so that none of those nekronic assaults quite smashed home.
Then, abruptly, we were falling. There was neither up nor down, but a frightful, abysmal vertigo that sucked us with impossible acceleration into the deeps below the universe itself. We were drawn into the black nighted heart of the nekron—its soul and center—and life itself receded to a point of infinity and was shut wholly out, away from us. If we had size it must have changed. If we had warmth and life it must have frozen instantly in all minds. In its last defense the nekron itself absorbed us.
25. Return Voyage
Luckily I cannot remember that last horror very clearly.
It was I who saved us from that.
This was my purpose. It was the plan from the beginning. That was why I had been allowed from the start to keep my own memories intact. For I was the anchor man at the end of the chain, the solid rock and the lifeline extending beyond the shore of sanity and logic and the monstrous, non-matter maelstrom engulfing the others.
They had needed their double minds to meet and fight the nekron, to carry the battle to its own grounds. But my purpose was to anchor the line. I could feel them losing touch with all familiar things, feel the dark destroying silence of the nekron closing them in.
It closed about me too but not completely. It could not shut out my memories. I had a singleness of mind that made a chain too strong to snap. I remembered my own world, my own time, with a clarity unimpaired by double memories. All the small things that are changeless realities came back to me in one strong pouring tide.
The little things that mean nothing alone—things like firelight moving on the walls of an old room, the smell of freshly-cut grass at twilight, the sharp fragrance of printer’s ink, the heart-shaking thunder of a flight of planes moving in formation overhead, the taste of cold sweet spring-water gushing from a mountainside.
I remembered Earth.
So I woke them out of the dead emptiness of the nekron’s heart. Their minds clung to mine and mine clung to the lifeline of my own world, my own time, my own indestructible memories.
Last of all De Kalb struck—with Belem’s mind locked into his.
We were in the nekron’s heart now. We had been admitted to its most vulnerable spot. Once before Belem had done something very like this—when he joined his mind with mine and summoned the nekronic killer to defeat Paynter’s men.
Now in the nekron’s very citadel, its innermost heart—he gripped our minds closer together. He forced them until they were one indeed.
He opened that gigantic ultimate mind to the nekron!
Two of the finest brains of two cultures guided us then—Belem, inhuman, emotionless, machine-bred, half-human—and De Kalb, with all his brilliance and his humanity balancing Belem’s cold logic. Behind these two-in-one, the rest of us—a single unit now.
Paynter and Murray—hammer and anvil!
Topaz and Letta Essen—incomparably resourceful, evading the counter-attack.
I with my single mind, holding fast to the solidity of the normal universe, standing like a wall behind the others, holding open the gates in that wall through which we had come, through which the power of the Face of Ea poured to help us.
The power of the nekron flowed through us, channeled by Belem and De Kalb. It emptied, drained like a falling ocean into us. But we were not vulnerable, now. It could not—feed—upon us.
Water, changing to steam, must expand, find room to accommodate its physical change. The process must be completed. But this monstrous change could not be completed in any way normal to the nekron. It had not drained its force into us by choice—Belem had drawn and channeled it.
Now its normal release was blocked.
We were battered back beneath the onslaught of that terribly concentrated power. But we held. Somehow we held—the multiple minds of two civilizations, chosen and tempered by the last, greatest science of all.
Then—it exploded.
There is no other word. It expanded tremendously, through us and beyond us, and that frightful concentration of alien force was gone. The disincarnated, dissolved units of the nekron expanded—seeds of the death beyond death—but helpless in this single moment beyond time, no longer a functioning unit capable of planned action.
We could never kill it—but we had it helpless for the first instant in the history of the universe. One moment outside time was all we had—but one moment was enough.
The burning suns reeled around us again. They blurred-time blurred and space and the incredible infinite complexity of the universe shuddered and was divided. That was the end.
The suns flickered out around us. We were sinking into a dimness that swallowed up our senses as the darkness swallowed the light. But I could not quite let go. There was trouble somewhere—a question unanswered.