Читать книгу Seven Out of Time - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 8

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MY FINGERS DUG INTO the rail they had grasped to pull me up the stairs. That at least was firm and hard. That at least was real.

"Less real than I," said the little man who twice apparently had materialized out of nothingness. "The staircase exists only as you have conceived it. So do the walls about us and the floor on which you see me stand."

I'd not spoken aloud the thought to which he responded. Was he reading my mind?

"A crude way of phrasing it," he answered that unspoken thought, "but as near the truth as you can comprehend." Damn him! He was laughing at me. I knew he was laughing at me even though his round face with its artificial-seeming skin was as still as a modelled mask. He was—Hold on, John March. You're in that dream again, that confounded dream. What you think you hear him say is just the answer of one part of your mind to the thoughts of another. You no more see this odd human than just now you saw Evelyn Rand—

"Wrong," the little man said. "You saw her, or rather a projection of her that I presented to you in order to ascertain if what I already had observed is a constant of your psyche or an aberration."

I could not be dreaming that. I had no idea of what it meant.

"The hell you say," I flung at him to conceal my growing apprehension. "What am I, some kind of guinea pig with which you're experimenting?"

A faint, mocking smile brushed his still lips. Or did it?

"Exactly," he murmured.

That enraged me.

"Experiment with this," I yelled and leaped down at him, my fist flailing straight for his round, inhuman face—

It whizzed through empty air! My feet pounded on the floor. The little man had vanished—

Sound behind me whirled me around. The fellow was on the staircase, three steps up. He was exactly where I had been, an instant before! But how in the name of reason had he gotten there? He couldn't have passed me, he couldn't possibly have passed me. To get to where he was he would have had to go up the steps at the same time, by the same path, I had plunged down them. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space—

"Matter can be in one place and then in another," he said in the slow, patient way one explains some complex idea to a child, choosing phrases suitable to its limited comprehension, "without ever having been anywhere between. Even you should know that. Or are you not acquainted with the observations on the behavior of electrons that already had been made in your time."

"In my time! What time?"

"The Twentieth Century, as you reckon it." I had the curious feeling that he was speaking of some period in the remote past. "I am certain our researches are correct on that point."

I shook my head. He couldn't be saying that, he just could not. It didn't make sense. With my confused sense of wrongness about all this was mingled a sort of baffled exasperation. Damn him! He was coldly amused by my bewilderment.

Queer! No flicker of the muscles in his face, no changing light in his black and piercing eyes, revealed that to me. But I was as aware of his amusement as though he had laughed aloud. Was I too, very dimly, beginning to learn to do without speech? Was I tapping some subtle current of communication that 'til now I had not even suspected to exist?

"Who are you?" I blurted. "Who the devil are you?"

He was growing tired of this colloquy between us. "If you must think of me by a name, Achronos Astaris will do." He had stopped playing, was coming to the nub of his purpose with me.

"What, John March, is it that has impelled you to forget everything else in your desire to find Evelyn Rand? What is it that makes her a necessity to you, so that without her you are not complete? What is it that has made ambition, the anxiety for preferment, pride in the occupation you chose for your lifework, insignificant compared with the need you feel for her? What force is it that draws you to her with a strength greater than the attraction of gravity, greater than the thirst of the sodium ion for the hydroxyl group it tears even from water? What chemistry of the emotions has governed your actions since she became real to you?"

His eyes, his dreadful, probing eyes, demanded an answer. "I love her," I flung at Astaris. "God help me, I have fallen in love with her."

I had not known it 'til that moment, had not realized it. But it was true. I was in love with the girl for whom I had been searching so long, the girl whom I'd never seen, with whom I had never spoken.

"Ahhh," Achronos Astaris breathed. "I know that the name of your reaction to her is love." For the first time I sensed a wavering in the clear, cold surety of him. "But what, precisely, does that mean?"

I glared at him, anger once more mounting within me. His eyes gripped mine with a hold almost palpable. He was invading the most secret recesses of my being, was stripping naked my very soul.

Melodramatic phrases, but no phrases less turgid would fit.

"It is most puzzling." Did I hear Astaris say that or was I reading his thoughts? "There is something more than physical chemistry, more than biological tropism, involved. It is plain that he has an urge to hold her naked against his nakedness, to merge—"

"Damn you!" I yelled, outraged. "Damn your rotten, prurient mind," and the wrath that exploded in my brain hurled me up the stairs to smash him—

I smashed instead against—nothingness! Against a wall invisible, immaterial, but as impenetrable as though a screen of armor plate had sprung up between me and the little man.

Still so possessed of wrath that I did not apprehend its full enormity, I clubbed at the unseen barrier with my fists. There was no sound of impact, none at all, but my knuckles were bruised and bleeding. I kicked at empty air and saw the toes of shoes buckle against nothing I could see. Exhausted, I put palms against it and felt perdurable nothingness warm as though it were animate flesh, vibrant with some ineluctable life, impenetrable as granite.

And all the time Achronos Astaris watched me with a cold, mildly interested detachment, as some scientist might watch a Siamese fighting fish batter its nose against glass inserted into its aquarium to bar it from the other Betta it has marked as its victim.

He sighed now as I hung, panting and weak against the invisible partition. "You learned quite quickly. There is a definite advance in five hundred years."

I stared at him too choked to speak by anger that had not subsided at all.

Oddly, while Astaris was still clear and distinct as he had been, the staircase, the ceiling and the walls were fading again into the gray, shapeless blur out of which they had formed. I glanced down, anger giving way to panic! There was only grayness beneath me, empty grayness! I looked behind. Nothing was behind me but a fearsome gray vacancy. I was enclosed by it, suspended in it. Once more the terror of height possessed me, the vertiginous, heart-stopping awareness of an unfathomable abyss into which I must plunge when Achronos Astaris released me.

For, wheeling again, I had found his eyes upon me, pulsating pinpoints of black flame, and it seemed to me that only those eyes held me where I was. Not the eyes but an impalpable something, a Force unknowable, that merely manifested itself in those eyes as it reached through the infrangible barrier that had frustrated my attack on Astaris, and embraced me.

And those eyes were not only holding me there, suspended. They were dissecting me, not my body but my ego? soul?—the me that is not physical yet lacking which I would not be. Keen, cutting lancets, they were peeling layer after layer from my psyche, searching, searching for something that was there but that they could not find.

Anger they found, and fear, and bewildered awe transcending fear, but that for which they probed they could not find. Gradually they faltered, at a loss. And then I was aware that Astaris had given up his search, that he was sending a message out into the boundless ether, that he was waiting for a reply.

I do not know, even yet, how I knew all this. I know only that for a little while I had the power, and that I was soon to lose it.

"No," the answer came. Not a voice. Not sound at all. Naked thought from an infinite distance. "Send him to us, but you must remain yet awhile."

Astaris did not like that. I was aware he did not, but I was aware also that he would submit. Abruptly fear flared into terror, into such paralyzing, agonized terror that it rocked the very foundations of my mind.

Now! NOW! Astaris' eyes released me! Astaris himself was obliterated by an inward swoop of the grayness. It swirled about me, and I was enveloped by a dizzy darkness.

Not darkness! An absence of form, of color, of reality itself. I was falling through nothingness. I was not falling. I was caught up in some vast maelstrom. I was whirling through some spaceless, timeless non-existence altogether beyond experience. I was rushing headlong through incalculable distances, distances beyond comprehension, yet I knew myself to be altogether motionless. The Universe had fallen away from me, was somewhere behind me, light centuries behind me. I was beyond life. I was beyond death. I was beyond being itself.

And all about me was the soft, voiceless whisper of swirling dust.