So, in this case, as had become his habit, Sunday followed Bill and me up to the mistwall and waited while we made our measurements and tests. These showed it to be little different from the many other walls we had tested. But when we finally went through this time, we found a difference.
We came out in a—what? A courtyard, a square, a plaza... take your pick. It was an oval of pure white surface and behind, all about it, rose a city of equal whiteness. Not the whiteness of new concrete, but the whiteness of veinless, milk-colored marble. And there was no sound about it. Not even the cries of birds or insects. No sound at all.
14
“…We were the first,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner—
“Whoever burst,
Into that silent sea...”
If you know that bit of poetry, if you love poetry the way I do, you will be able to feel something like the feeling that hit Bill and me when we emerged from the mistwall into that city. Those lines give it to you. It was with us and that city beyond our time, as it had been with that sea and Coleridge’s Mariner. It was a city of silence, silence such as neither of us had ever heard, and such as we had never suspected could exist—until that moment. We were trapped by that silence, held by it, suddenly motionless and fixed, for fear of intruding one tiny noise into that vast, encompassing and majestic void of soundlessness, like flower petals suddenly encased in plastic. It held us both, frozen; and the fear of being the first to break it was like a sudden hypnotic clutch on our minds, too great for us to resist.
We were locked in place; and perhaps we might have stood there until we dropped, if it had been left to our own wills alone to save us.
But we were rescued. Shatteringly and suddenly, echoing and reechoing off to infinity among the white towers and ways before us, came the loud scrape of claws on a hard surface; and a broad, warm, hard, leopard-head butted me in the ribs, knocking me off my frozen balance to fall with a deafening clatter to the pavement, as my gun and my equipment went spilling all around me.
With that, the spell was smashed. It had only been that first, perfect silence that operated so powerfully on our emotions, and that, once destroyed, could never be recreated. It was an awesome, echoing place, that city—like some vast, magnificent tomb. But it was just a place once its first grip on us had been loosed. I picked myself up.
“Let’s have a look around,” I said to Bill.
He nodded. He was not, as I was, a razor addict; and over the two weeks or more since I had met him, he had been letting his beard go with only occasional scrapings. Now a faint soft fuzz darkened his lower face. Back beyond the mistwall, with his young features, this had looked more ridiculous than anything else; but here against the pure whiteness all around us and under a cloudless, windless sky, the beard, his outdoor clothing, his rifle and instruments, all combined to give him a savage intruder’s look. And if he looked so, just from being unshaved, I could only guess how I might appear, here in this unnaturally perfect place.
We went forward, across the level floor of the plaza, or whatever, on which we had entered. At its far side were paths leading on into the city; and as we stepped on one, it began to move, carrying us along with it. Sunday went straight up in the air, cat-fashion, the moment he felt it stir under his feet, and hopped back off it. But when he saw it carrying me away from him, he leaped back on and came forward to press hard against me as we rode—it was the way he had pressed against me on the raft during the storm, before he, the girl and I had had to swim for shore.
The walkway carried us in among the buildings, and we were completely surrounded by milky whiteness. I had thought at first that the buildings had no windows; but apparently they had—only of a different sort than anything I had ever imagined. Seeing the windows was apparently all a matter of angle. One moment it seemed I would be looking at a blank wall—the next I would have a glimpse of some shadowed or oddly angled interior. It was exactly the same sort of glimpse that you get of the mercury line in a fever thermometer when you rotate the thermometer to just the proper position. But there was no indication of life, anywhere.
Around us, over us, the city was lifeless. This was more than a fact of visual observation. We could feel the lack of anything living in all the structures around us like an empty ache in the mind. It was not a painful or an ugly feeling, but it was an unpleasant feeling just for the reason that it was not a natural one. That much massive construction, empty, ready and waiting, was an anomaly that ground against the human spirit. The animal spirit as well, for that matter; because Sunday continued to press against me for reassurance as we went. We stepped off the walkway at last—it stopped at once as we did so—and looked around at a solid mass of white walls, all without visible windows or doors.
“Nothing here,” said Bill Gault after a while. “Let’s go back now.”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
I could not have explained to him just why I did not want to give up. It was the old reflex at the back of my head, working and working away at something, and feeling that it was almost on top of that missing clue for which it searched. There had to be something here in this empty city that tied in with our search to make reason out of the time storm, the time lines, and all the business of trying to handle them or live with them. I could feel it.
“There’s no one here,” Bill said.
I shook my head.
“Let’s get inside,” I said. “Any one of these buildings will do.”
“Get inside? How?” He looked around us at the marble-white, unbroken walls.
“Smash our way in somehow,” I said. I was looking around myself for something to use as a tool. “If nothing else, the machine pistol ought to make a hole we can enlarge—”
“Never mind,” he said, in a sort of sigh. I turned back to look at him and saw him already rummaging in his pack. He came out with what looked like a grey cardboard package, about ten inches long and two wide, two deep. He opened one end and pulled out part of a whitish cylinder wrapped in what looked like wax paper.
The cylinder of stuff was, evidently, about the same consistency as modeling clay. With its wax paper covering off, it turned out to be marked in sections, each about two inches long. Bill pulled off a couple of sections, rewrapped the rest and put it away, back in his pack. The two sections he had pulled out squeezed between his hands into a sort of thin pancake, which he stepped over and pressed against one of the white walls. It clung there, about three feet above the ground.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Explosive,” he said. “A form of plastic—” He pronounced it plas-teek, with the emphasis on the second syllable—“but improved. It doesn’t need any fuse. You can do anything with it safely, even shoot a bullet into it. Nothing happens until it’s spread out like that, thin enough so that sufficient area can react to the oxygen in the air.”
He moved back from the wall where he had spread out the pancake, beckoning me along with him. I came, without hesitating.
We stood about thirty feet off, waiting. For several minutes nothing happened. Then there was an insignificant little poof that would hardly have done credit to a one inch firecracker; but an area of the white wall at least six feet in diameter seemed to suck itself inward and disappear. Beyond, there was a momentary patch of blackness; and then we were looking into a brightly lit chamber or room of some sort, with several large solid-looking shapes sitting on its floor area, shapes too awkwardly formed to be furniture and too purposelessly angular to seem as if they were machinery.