He put his arms around Alice and said, "You did what you had to do. If you hadn't, he might've killed me."
"Yes, I know. I've killed before, but those people were strangers attacking us. I liked Gilgamesh, and now . . ."
Burton thought it was best to allow her to weep out her guilt and grief. He released her and turned to the others. Nur asked him what he had been doing in the room. He told them of the lens.
"You must've been standing there for at least an hour."
Frigate said.
"Yes, I know, but the state seemed to last only a minute."
"What about the aftereffects?" Nur said.
Burton hesitated, then said, "Apart from being shaken up, I feel . . . I feel . . . a tremendous closeness to all of you! Oh, I've been fond of some of you, but . . . now . . . I love all of you!"
"That must've been a shock," Frigate murmured. Burton ignored him.
The Moor held up the multifaceted device and looked through it with his right eye closed.
"I see nothing. It has to be fitted next to the eye."
Burton said, "I thought that the lens was something which only the chief of the twelve, Thanabur, would wear. I presumed that it was some sort of ritual token or emblem of leadership, something traditional. I may've been wrong. Perhaps everybody took a turn wearing it during the Council meetings. It may be that the lens gave all of them a feeling such as I had, a closeness and love for everybody in the room."
"In which case, X was able to overcome that feeling," Tai-Peng said.
"What I don't understand," Burton said, "is why the lens put me into a trance yet didn't seem to affect Thanabur."
"Perhaps," Nur said, "the Councilors were used to it. After wearing it many times, they got only a mild effect from it."
Nur fitted the lens under his eyelids and shut his right eye. Immediately, his face took on an expression of ecstasy, though his body remained motionless. When two minutes had passed, Burton shook the Moor by the shoulder. Nur came out of his trance and began weeping. But when he'd recovered and had taken the lens out, he said, "It does induce a state similar to that which the saints have attempted to describe."
He handed the lens to Burton.
"But it's a false state brought about by an artificial thing. It's not the true state. That can only be attained by spiritual development."
Some of the others wanted to try. Burton said, "Later. We may have used up time we sorely need. We have to find X before he finds us."
48
* * *
They came to an enormous closed door above which were more of the untranslatable characters. Burton halted the train of chairs and got out of his. A button on the wall seemed to be the only obvious means of opening the doors. He pressed, and the two sections slid away from each other into recesses. He looked into a wide hall ending in two more huge doors. Burton pressed the button by that.
They looked into a domed chamber which had to be half a mile across. The floor was earth on which grew a bright green short-bladed grass and, further on, trees. Brooks ran through it here and there, their sources cataracts forty or fifty feet high. Flowering bushes were many, and there were flat-topped rocks which had served as tables, if the plates and cups and cutlery on them meant anything.
The ceiling was a blue across which wisps of clouds moved, and a simulacrum of the sun was at its zenith.
They walked in and looked around. Human skeletons lay here and there, the nearest around a rock. There were also the bones of birds, deer, and some catlike and doglike and raccoonlike animals.
"They must've come here to get back to Nature," Frigate said. "A very reasonable facsimile thereof, anyway."
They had reasoned that X had transmitted a radio code which had activated the tiny black ball in the brains of the tower-dwellers and caused poison to be released in their bodies. But why had the animals died?
Starvation.
They left the chamber. Before they had traveled a mile, they came across another curiosity, the most puzzling and awe-inspiring of all: A transparent outward-leaning wall on their left revealed a Brobdingnagian shaft. A bright shifting light flared from below. They got off the chairs to look down into the well. And they cried out with wonder.
Five hundred feet below them was a raging furnace of many differently colored shapes, all closely packed but seeming to pass through each other or to merge at times.
Burton shaded his eyes with a hand and stared into it. After a while he could occasionally distinguish the shapes of the things that whirled around and around and shot up and down and sideways.
He turned away, his eyes hurting.
"They're wathans. Just like those I saw above the heads of the twelve Councilors. The well must be of some material which enables us to see them."
Nur handed him a pair of dark glasses.
"Here. I found these in a box on a shelf near here."
Burton and the others put on the glasses and stared into the enormous well. Now he could see the things more clearly, the changing shifting colors in the always expanding-contracting shapes, the six-sided tentacles which shot out, flailed, waved, then shrank back into the body.
Burton, leaning out, his back pressed against the wall, looked up. The brightness showed him a ceiling of the gray metal about a hundred feet above him. He turned around and tried to see across to the other side of the well. He couldn't. He peered down into it. Far far below was a gray solid. Or was it his imagination, an illusion created by the metamorphosing horde, that made him now think that the solidity was pulsing?
He stepped back, removed the glasses, and rubbed his aching eyes.
"I don't know what this means, but we can't stay here any longer."
They'd passed a number of bays enclosing lift shafts with no upper passage. But after they'd gone a quarter of a mile, they came to one which extended up past their level.
"This may take us to the floor where the gateway is."
Again, they waited until each person had gotten safely up the shaft before the next flew up.
The bay opened onto another corridor. There were thirteen doors along this, each an entrance into a very large suite of luxuriously furnished rooms. In one was a table of some glossy reddish hardwood on which was a transparent sphere. Suspended in it were three doll-sized shapes.
"Looks like Monat and two other of his kind," Burton said.
"Something like three-dimensional photographs," Frigate said.
"I don't know," Alice said. "But there seems to be a family resemblance. Of course, I suppose they'd all look alike to anyone not familiar with the race. Still . . ."
Croomes had not said a word for a long time. Her grim face had indicated, though, that she was struggling terribly to accept the reality of this place. Nothing here had been what she expected; there had been no welcoming choir of angels, no glory-blazing God on a throne with her mother standing at His right hand to greet her.
Now she said, "Those two could be his parents."
There were many things to investigate in the rooms, but Burton hurried them on out.
They had gone about two hundred feet when they came to a bay, the first they'd seen on the right-hand wall. Burton got out from the chair and looked along the shaft. Its bottom was level with the floor; the top wasn't more than fifty feet up.
Wisps of fog rushed across it, apparently drawn from the outside and through vents in the wall opposite.
He withdrew his head.
"That might lead to the dome on the outside, the one which only Piscator could enter."
The Japanese had been intelligent and brave. He'd probably done as Burton had, tested the invisible field in the shaft, figured out that it would hold him, and then descended. But how could he have activated the field if he didn't know the codeword or whatever it was that operated it?
However, this shaft was different from the others. It was very short, and there was only one way to go if you were at the top. Sensors might determine that the field was activated if someone
came in from the top. The sensors could detect that there was only one person and that he wouldn't be standing in the field unless he wanted to go down. To go up would require a codeword of some sort. Or maybe it didn't, the bottom part of the field would act like the top, only in the reverse direction.
Where was Piscator?
To test his theory, Burton stepped into the shaft. After three seconds, he was lifted slowly upward. At the top of the shaft, he stepped out into a short metal corridor. It curved near its end and undoubtedly opened into the corridor in the dome.
Fog billowed around the corner, but the lights were strong enough to pierce it.
He walked into the corridor and at once felt a very slight resistance. Its strength increased as he advanced struggling.
When he was panting and unable to go even an inch farther, he turned back. His way was unimpeded to the shaft. When he returned to the lower level, he gave a short report.
"The field works both ways," he concluded.
The Moor said, "According to the Parseval report, there was only one entrance. Yet . . .there must be an opening, a door of some kind, for the aircraft to come in. There were none on top of the tower. I think, however, that they just weren't visible. Also, there must be ethical fields in the entrances for the aircraft. Otherwise, anybody could go in that way. Including X. Surely he must have gone out on legitimate business from time to time in an aerial vessel."
"You forget about the hypothetical wathan distorter," Burton said. "That would've enabled X to get through the dome entrance, too."
"Yes. I know that. What I'm getting at is that if we could find the hangar for the aircraft, and then find out how to operate them, we could leave here at any time we pleased."
"They'd better be easier and simpler to fly than an airplane," Frigate said.
"No doubt they are."
"Say, I've got an idea," Frigate said, grinning. "Piscator was a Sufi, and he had no trouble entering. You're a Sufi and a highly developed ethicalist. Why don't you go out and try to get back in through the dome?"
The Moor grinned back at him.
"You'd like to see if I really am as advanced as I should be, wouldn't you? And what happens if I can't get out? Or, if I do, can't get back in? No, Peter. It would be a waste of time and an exhibition of pride on my part. You know that, yet you urge me to do it. You are teasing me. As a disciple, you sometimes lack the proper reverent attitude toward your master."
They returned to their chairs and flew slowly down the curving corridor. Burton was beginning to feel that their tour was very informative, even if often puzzling, but useless. This was no way to go about finding X.
What else could they do? There were no directories on the walls, and they couldn't read them if there were. It was frustrating and futile to proceed in this manner, yet they just couldn't sit around in one place and hope that X would find them. If he did, he'd be armed with some irresistible weapon. No doubt of that.
On the other hand, they had been fortunate in locating the residences of the twelve and of Monat Grrautut and the dome entrance. Perhaps, the place where X did his experiments or a control center he used might be near his apartment.
They came to a closed door and passed it. There would be many thousands of such in this vast place. They couldn't afford the time to open every one.
But when he was thirty feet beyond it, Burton raised his hand to signal a halt.
"What is it?" Alice said.
"I've a certain feeling, a strong hunch."
He lowered the chair to the floor.
"I'll just take a moment to check this out."
He pressed a button on the wall by the door, and the door slid soundlessly into a recess. Beyond was a cavernous room with much varied equipment on tables and, against the walls, many cabinets. There was only one skeleton. A violent explosion had evidently caught someone as he was passing by a cabinet or doing something with it. The top of the cabinet had been blown off, judging from the outwardly twisted metal, the pieces of some glassy substance on the floor, and metal pieces inside the skeleton. It lay twenty feet out from the wreck, and under the bones were dark bloodstains.
Just beyond the skeleton the blast had knocked a star-shaped metal construction from the top of a table. It lay on the floor emitting what looked like many-colored heat waves.
Straight ahead of Burton and near the center of the room was a flying chair. It was on the floor and tenantless, one side to him, and fresh bloodstains on the arm.
Just beyond the chair was a great revolving disc on a cylinder about two feet high. Cabinets and consoles were on its perimeter. In the center was a fixed platform. A man sat on a chair of some semitransparent stuff in the middle of the fixed platform. Before him was a console with a sloping instrument panel and several live screens. He was adjusting a dial, his eyes fixed on the largest oscilloscope. His profile was to Burton.
Burton put a finger to his lips and with the other hand gestured at his companions to get off their chairs. Then he. unholstered his revolver and indicated that the others should do the same.
The operator had long fox-red hair, a pale white skin, and the eye presented to Burton lacked an epicanthic fold. If the man hadn't been so fat, Burton might not have identified him. Fat, however, couldn't be removed in such a short time.
Burton walked slowly through the door and toward the man. The others were fanning out, their guns ready.
When they were within sixty feet of him, the man saw them. He reared up out of the chair, grimaced, and sat back down. His hand shot out, dived into a recess under the panel, and came out holding a strange-looking device. It had a pistollike butt for gripping, a barrel about a foot long and three inches in diameter, and a sphere at its end the size of a large apple.
Burton cried out, "Loga!"
He ran forward.
49
* * *
The ethical rose again and shouted, "Stop! Or I'll fire!"
They kept on running. He sighted along the barrel through the transparent sphere, and a thin scarlet line shot soundlessly from the sphere. Smoke curled up from the shallow arc drawn on the metal before the group.
They halted. Anything that could melt that metal was very impressive.
"I can cut you all into two with a single sweep of this," Loga said. "I don't want to. There's been far too much violence, and I'm sick of it. But I will kill you if I must. Now . . . all of you turn around in unison and throw your weapons as far as you can toward the door."
Burton said, "There are nine guns trained on you. You might get one or two of us, but you'll be blown to bits."
The Ethical smiled grimly.
"It looks like a Mexican standoff, doesn't it?"
He paused. "But it isn't, believe me!"
Croomes shouted, "No, it isn't! You Satan, you fiend from Hell!"
Her pistol boomed. The scarlet beam flashed out from Loga's weapon at the same time that eight other guns exploded.
Loga fell backwards. Burton ran, leaped upon the revolving disc, darted over it to the fixed platform, and pointed his revolver at the prostrate Ethical. The others crowded around him.
While Turpin and Tai-Peng picked up the bleeding and ashen-skinned man from the floor, Burton seized the sphere-ended weapon. Loga was seated roughly in his chair. He held his hand over a gushing wound on the biceps of his right arm. "He got Croomes!" Alice said, pointing. Burton looked once at the severed body and turned away.
Loga looked around as if he couldn't believe what had happened, then said, "There are three boxes in the upper-right-hand drawer in the console. Bring them to me, and I'll be all right in a few minutes."
"This isn't a trick?" Burton said.
"No! I swear! I've had enough of tricks and murder! I meant you no harm! I just wanted you to be disarmed so that I could explain without worrying about you. You're such a violent breed!"
"Look who's talking," Burton said.
"I didn't do it because I loved it!"
"Neither did we," B
urton said, but he wasn't so sure that he was wholly truthful.
They brought out three silver boxes set with green emeralds. Burton opened each one slowly and inspected the contents. As the Ethical had said, each contained a bottle. Two held liquid; one, some pink stuff.
"How do I know they won't release some sort of gas?" Burton said. "Or that they aren't poison?"
"They won't be," Nur said. "He does not want to die now."
"That's right," Loga said. "Something terrible may happen soon, and only I know how to stop it. I may need your help."
"You could have had it all along," Burton said, "if only you'd told us the truth in the beginning."
"I had my reasons for not doing so," Loga said. "Very good reasons. And then things got out of hand."
He squeezed one of the bottles, and a clear liquid spurted out onto his hand. After rubbing it over the wound on his shoulder, wincing at the pain, he drank from the second bottle. From the third he poured out a pink gooey substance into his left hand and then pressed it over the wound.
"The first was to sterilize the wound," he said. "The second was to cancel the shock and give me strength. The third will heal the wound in a very short time. Three days."
Burton said, "Where did we wound you the first time?"
"The only bad wound was in my left thigh."
His grayness of skin had been replaced by a normal color within a minute. He asked for some water, which Frigate brought to him. Burton lit a cigarette. His questions were a logjam in his throat. Which one should be spit out first?
Before the inquisition, though, certain things had to be done. Burton held his revolver on Loga while the others brought their chairs in and Frigate made an extra trip to get Burton's. These were placed on the floor on the side of the disc where they'd be out of sight of Croomes' body. While this was being done, Loga was allowed to lift his bloodstained chair to a designated spot. The other chairs were then arranged closely in a semicircle facing the Ethical.
"I think we could all stand a little drink," Burton said. Loga told them how to set the controls of a grail box to get their orders filled. His own was a yellow wine which the others had never found in their grails. Burton duplicated Loga's request and tasted the wine. It was comparable to nothing he'd ever had before, delicate yet pungent. For some reason it evoked a slowly receding tide of dark green waters above which flew giant white birds with crimson beaks.