The Time Axis

---

The whole thing never happened and I can prove it -- now. But Ira De Kalb made me wait a billion years to write the story.

So we start with a paradox. But the strangest thing of all is that there are no real paradoxes involved, not one. This is a record of logic. Not human logic, of course, not the logic of this time or this space.

I don't know if men will ever journey again, as we journeyed, to that intersection of latitude and longitude where a shell hangs forever -- forever and yet not forever, in space and out of space -- on the axis stretching through time from beginning to end.

From the dawn of the nebulae to the twilight of absolute entropy, when the framework of the cosmos has broken down into chaos, still that axis will stretch from dawn to dusk, from beginning to end. For as this world spins on an axis through space, so the sphere of time spins on its own axis.

I never understood the ultimate answer. That was beyond me. It took the combined skills of three great civilizations far apart in time to frame that godlike concept in which the tangible universe itself was only a single factor.

And even then it was not enough. It took the Face of Ea -- which I shall never be able to describe fully.

I saw it, though. I saw it, luminous in the reddish dusk, speaking to me silently above the winds that scour perpetually across the dead, empty lands of a day yet to come. I think it will stand there forever in an empty land on a dead planet, watching the endless night draw slowly on through days as long as years. The stars will stand and the Earth-nekropoh's will stand and the Face will stand there forever. I was there. I saw it.

Was there? Will be? Maybe? I can't tell now. But of all stories in the world, this more than any needs a pattern.

Since the beginning is in the past, before men as such existed at all, the only starting place I know is a temporal and personal one, when I was drawn into the experiment. Now that I know a little more about the nature of time it seems clearer to me that past, present and future were all stepping stones, arranged out of sequence. The first step took place two months ago.

That was here in this time and space. Or in the time and space that existed two months ago. There's been a change.

Now this is the way it used to be.

For me, the Big Ride. You start when you're born. You climb on the toboggan and then you're off. But you can only have the one ride. No use telling the ticket-taker you want to go again. They shovel you under at the end of the slope and there's a new lot of passengers waiting. You've had your three-score and ten. And it's over.

I'd ridden the toboggan for thirty-five years. Jeremy Cortland, Jerry Cortland of the Denver Post, the Frisco Call-Bulletin, PM, AP, Time, Collzers -- sometimes staff, sometimes roving assignments. I leaned out of the toboggan and plucked fruit from the orchards as I sped by. Strange fruit, sometimes. Generic term is News. And that covers a lot of territory.

There was a splinter in the toboggan's seat. I had on red flannel underwear. I had a nervous tic. I couldn't sit still. I kept reaching out, grabbing. Years of it, of by-lines that said "cabled by Jeremy Cortland."

Russia, China, war coverage, Piccard's bathyscaphe, the supersonic and altostratosphere planes, the Russian earth-borer gadget, the Big Eye at Palomar -- the coal strikes and the cracker lynchings and that dirt farmer in North Dakota who suddenly began to work miracles. (His patients didn't stay cured, you remember, and he disappeared.)

The Big Ride. In between I grabbed at other things. One marriage, one divorce, and more and more bulges. Long bouts, between assignments. I didn't give a -- well, you can't use that word in some papers. But it was all right. What did I expect, heaven?

The eyes aren't quite as clear as they used to be. The skin under them is a little puffy. One chin begins to be not quite enough. But it's still the Big Ride. With a splinter in the seat.

Dodging alimony payments, I skipped to Brazil, got in on a submarine exploration of the Amazon, wrote it up, sold it to AP as a feature. The first installment appeared on the same day as another little item -- buried in the back -- that said 85 and 87 had been made artificially.

Astatine and francium -- the missing link in the periodic table -- two billion years ago you could have picked up all the astatine and francium you wanted, just by reaching down and grabbing. If you'd been around at the time. Since then 85 and 87 have decayed into other elements. But Seaborg and Ghiorso at UC made them synthetically, with the big cyclotron and atomic oven transmutation, and the column on one side of that trivial item said SECOND BURN-DEATH VICTIM FOUND, and on the other there was a crossword puzzle.

I didn't care, either.

Those deaths, by an indefinable sort of burning, were just starting to confound the United States authorities at the time. They hadn't yet spread to South America.

There was another item in that same ParAr that concerned me though I didn't know it at the time seemed that Ira De Kalb was working with Military Intelligence on some sort of highly secret project -- so secret you could read all about it as far south as Rio if you had the price of the paper.

I had my own current problem. And it was a very odd one.

The thing started six weeks before it began. You'll have to get used to paradox -- which isn't paradox once you grasp the idea.

It started in an alley in Rio, a little cobbled tunnel opening off the Rua d'Ouvidor, and what I was doing there at three o'clock of a summer morning in January I'll never be able to tell you. I'd been drinking. Also I'd been playing chemin de fer and there was a thick pad of banknotes in the inside pocket of my white jacket, another stuffed into the dark wine-colored cummerbund I was wearing.

Looking down, I could see the toes of my shoes twinkling in the moonlight as I walked. The sky twinkled too, and the lights up in the hills and out on the bay. The world was a shiny place, revolving gently around me.

I was rich. But this time it was going to last. This time I'd cut out the binges and take a little house up in Petropolis, where it's cool, and I'd really get down to work on the analysis of news-coverage I'd been planning for so long. I'd made up my mind. I was drunk but I'd be sober again and the resolution would stay behind when the liquor died.

I don't often get these fits of decision but when they come they're valid enough and I knew this one was serious. That was a turning point in the career of Jerry Cortland, there in the moonlight on the checkered pavement.

What happened at the mouth of that alley I'll never really know. Fortunately for me I couldn't see or realize it clearly, being drunk.

It sprang from the deep shadow and put out two arms at me. That much I'm sure of. Two arms that never touched me. They never meant to. They shot past my ears, and I heard a thin hissing noise and something seemed to turn over in my mind, leisurely, like a deep-buried thought stirring to life. I could all but feel it move.

I touched it.

I wish I hadn't. But I was thinking of my money. My hand closed on the thing -- on a part of it -- no one will ever know on just what. I will only tell you it was smooth with a smoothness that burned my hand. Friction burned it, I think now. The sheer velocity of the thing, though it was not then moving perceptibly, took a neat thin layer of cuticle off my palm wherever it touched. I think it slid out of my grip on a thin lubrication of my own skin.

You know how it is when you touch something white-hot? For an instant it may feel cold. I didn't know I was burned. I closed my hand hard on the -- on whatever it was I had hold of. And the very pressure of the grip seemed to push it away, out of my hand, very smooth and fast. All I know is that a moment later I stood there, shaking my band because it stung and watching something dark in the moonlight vanish down the street with a motion that frightened me.

I was too dazed to shout. By the time my wits came back it had disappeared and the feeling of unreality it left behind made me doubt whether I had ever seen or felt it at all.

About ten minutes later I found my money was gone. So it wasn't a turning point in my life, after all. If things had worked out any differently I never would have met Ira De Kalb. I never would have got myself mixed up in that series of deaths which so far as I was concerned were only signposts pointing the way to De Kalb. Maybe it was a turning point, at that.

The mind as well as the senses can be awfully slow sometimes. The hand doesn't know it has been burned, the mind can't recognize the impossible when it confronts it. There are many little refuges for a mind that must not admit to itself the impossible has happened.

I went back to my hotel that night and got into bed. I had met a thief, I told myself drowsily, as I'd deserved -- walking a city street that late at night, loaded down with cash. I had it coming. He'd got my money and that was that. (He -- it -- hadn't touched the money, or me, except in that one brief unbalanced instant. The thing was impossible. But since it had happened, then it was possible and the mind could dismiss it.) I went to sleep.

And woke at dawn to the most extraordinary experience I'd ever had in my life, up to then. Even that encounter on the Rua d'Ouvidor hadn't been like this.

The experience was pure sensation. And the sensation was somewhere inside me, vaguely in the solar plexus region -- a soundless explosion of pure energy like a dazzling sun coming into sudden, radiant being. There aren't any accurate words to tell about it.

But I was aware of ring after ring of glowing vitality bursting outward from that nova in the deepest nerve-center of my body. For a timeless instant I lay there, bathed in it, feeling it pour like a new kind of blood through my veins. In that instant I knew what it was.

Then somebody turned off the power at its source.

I sat up abruptly, empty of the radiance, empty as if it had never happened, but filled terribly with the knowledge of what had caused it.

My head ached from the sudden motion. Dawn made the sky light outside and brimmed the room with a clear gray luminous pallor. I sat there holding my head in both hands and knowing -- knowing -- that somewhere in the city an instant ago a man had been killed.

There was no shadow of doubt in my mind. I was as sure as if I had had that strange sensation a hundred times before and each time seen a man die as it burst into a nova-glow inside me.

I wanted to go back to sleep and pretend it had been a dream. But I knew I couldn't. I dragged myself out of bed and into my clothes. I took my aching head and jangled nerves down into the street and found a yawning taxi-driver.

You see, I even knew where the dead man would be found. It was unthinkable that I should go there looking for him -- but I went. And I found him. He was lying huddled against the rim of a fountain in a little square not far from the place where I'd last seen my -- my thief -- of the night before vanishing with that disquieting, smooth swiftness in the moonlight.

The dead man was an Indian, probably a beggar. I stood there in the deserted square, looking down at him, hearing the early morning traffic moving noisily past, knowing someone would find us here together at any moment. I had never seen a victim of the burn-death before but I knew I looked at one now. It wasn't a real burn, properly speaking. Friction, I though, had done it. The eroded skin made me think of something, and I looked at my own palm.

I was standing there, staring from my burned hand to the dead man and then back again, when -- it happened again.

The bursting nova of pure radiance flared into, violence somewhere near the pit of my stomach. Vitality poured through my veins ...

I sold the series to AP as usual. There had been five of the murders in Rio before I got my idea about putting an end to them and by then the stories had begun to hit the States papers, some of them running my picture along with the sensational stuff about the deaths, and my uncanny ability at locating the bodies.

Looking back now, I suppose the only reason they didn't arrest me for murder was that they couldn't figure out how I'd done it. Luckily my hand had healed before the police and the papers began to connect me so tightly with the deaths.

After the fifth murder I got a reservation for New York. I had come to the conclusion that if I left Rio the murders would stop -- in Rio. I thought they might begin again in New York. I had to find out, you see. By then I was in pretty bad shape, for the best of reasons -- or the worst. Anyhow, I went back.

---

There was a message waiting for me at the airport. Robert J. Allister wanted to see me. I felt impressed. Allister runs a chain of news and picture magazines second only to Life and Time.

I phoned for an appointment, and they told me to come right up. I walked through a waiting-room full of people with prior appointments and they passed me right into the sanctum, with no preliminaries. I began to wonder if I'd been underestimating my own importance all these years. Allister himself rose behind his desk and offered me his hand. I waded forward, ankle-deep through Persian carpets, and took it. He told me to sit down. His voice was tired and he looked thinner and more haggard than his pictures.

"So you're Jerry Cortland," he said. "Been following your Rio stuff. Nice work. Care to drop it for awhile?" I gaped. He gave me a tired grin.

"I'd like you to work for me on contract," he said. "Let me explain. You know Ira De Kalb?"

"The poor man's Einstein?"

"In a way, maybe. He's a dilettante. He's a genius, really, I suppose. A mind like a grasshopper. He'll work out a whole new concept of mathematics and never bother to apply it. He -- well, you'll understand better after you've met him. He's onto something very new, just now. Something very important. I want some pieces written on it and De Kalb made a point of asking for you."

"But why?"

"He has his reasons. He'll explain to you -- maybe. I can't." He pushed the contract toward me. "How about it?"

"Well -- " I hesitated. My ex-wife had just slapped another summons on me, alimony again, and I could certainly use some money. "I'll try it," I said. "But I'm irresponsible. Maybe I won't stick to it."

"You'll stick," Allister said grimly, "once you've talked to De Kalb. That I can guarantee. Sign here."

De Kalb's house blended into the hillside as if Frank Lloyd Wright had built it with his own hands. I was out of breath by the time I got to the top of the gray stone terraces linked together by gray stone steps. A maid let me in and showed me to a room where I could wait.

"Mr. De Kalb is expecting you," she said. "He'll be back in about ten minutes."

Half the room was glass, looking out upon miles and miles of Appalachians, tumbled brown and green, with a dazzling sky above. There was somebody already there, apparently waiting too. I saw the outlines of a woman's spare, straight figure rising almost apologetically from a desk as I entered. I knew her by that air of faint apology no less than by her outline against the light.

"Dr. Essen!" I said. And I was aware then of my first feeling of respect for this job, whatever it was. You don't get two people like Letta Essen and Ira De Kalb under the same roof for anything trivial.

I knew Dr. Essen. I'd interviewed her twice, right after Hiroshima, about the work she'd done with Meitner and Frisch in establishing the nuclear liquid-drop concept of atomic fission. I wanted very much to ask her what she was doing here but I didn't. I knew I'd get more out of her if I let it come her way.

"Mr. De Kalb asked me to meet you, Mr. Cortland," she said in her pleasant soft voice. "Hello, it's nice to see you again. You've been having quite a time in Rio, haven't you?"

"Old stuff now," I said. "This looks promising, if you're in on it. What's up, anyhow?"

She gave me that shy smile again. She had a tired gentle face, gray curls cut very short, gray eyes like two flashes of light off a steel beam when she let you meet her direct gaze. Mostly she was too shy. But when you caught that rare quick glance of her it was almost frightening. You realized then the hard dazzling mind behind the eyes.

"I'll let Mr. De Kalb tell you all about that," she said. "It isn't my secret. But you're involved more than you know. In fact -- " She paused, not looking at me, but giving the corner of the carpet a gentle scowl. "In fact, I'd like to show you something. We've got a little time to spare, and I want your reaction to -- to something. Come with me and we'll see."

I followed her out into the hall, down a flight of steps and then into a big room, comfortably furnished. A study, I thought. But the bookshelves were empty now and everything was lightly filmed with dust.

"The fireplace, Mr. Cortland," Dr. Essen said, pointing.

It was an ordinary fireplace, gray stone in the pine-paneled wall, with a gray stone hearth. But there seemed to be a stain at one spot on the hearth, close to the wall. I stepped closer. Then I knelt to look.

The speed of a chain of thoughts comes as close as anything I know to annihilating time itself. The images that flashed through my mind seemed to come all at once.

I saw the stain. I thought -- transmutation. There was no overt reason but I thought it. And then before I could take it in clearly with my conscious mind, in the chambers of the unconscious I was standing again at the alley mouth in Rio at three in the morning, seeing a dark thing leap forward at me with its two hands outstretched.

I heard the thin humming in my ears, felt the burning of its touch. I remembered the sunburst of violent energy deep inside me that had heralded murder whenever it came. And I knew that all these were one -- all these and the stain upon the hearth. The knowledge came unbidden, without reason.

But it was sure.

I didn't question it. But I looked very closely at the stone. That stain was an irregular area where the stone seemed changed into another substance. I didn't know what the substance was. It looked wholly unfamiliar. The gray of the hearth stopped abruptly, along an irregular pattern, and gave place to a substance that seemed translucent, shot through with veins and striae that were lighter, like the veins in marble.

The pine panels beside the fireplace were partly stained like the stone and a little area of the carpet that came up to the edge of the hearth. Wood, stone and cloth alike had turned into this -- this marble stain. The veins in it were like tangled hair, curling together, embedded like some strange neural structure in half transparent flesh.

I looked up.

"Don't touch it," Dr. Essen said quickly.

I didn't mean to. I didn't need to. I knew what it would feel like. I knew that though it was perfectly motionless it would burn my hand with friction if I touched it. Dr. Essen knew too. I saw that in her face.

I stood up. "What is it?" I asked, my voice sounding oddly thin.

"The nekron," she told me, almost absently. She was searching my face and the keenness of her gaze was al- most painful to meet. "That's Mr. De Kalb's word for it. As good a word as any. It's -- a new type of matter. Mr. Cortland -- you have seen something like this before?" Her rare, direct look was like the sharpness of a knife going through me, cold and deep.

"Maybe," I said. "No, never, really. But -- "

"All right, I understand," she nodded. "I wanted to verify something. I've verified it. Thank you." She turned away toward the door. "We'd better get back. No, please -- no questions yet. I can't possibly explain until after you've seen the Record."

"The Record? What -- "

"It's something that was dug up in Crete. It's -- peculiar. But thoroughly convincing. You'll see it soon. Shall we go back?"

She locked the door behind us.

Certainly De Kalb didn't look his forty-seven years any more than a Greek statue does. He looked like a young man, big and well proportioned. His sleek hair lay flat and short upon his head, and his face was handsome in the vacant way the Belvedere's is.

There was no latent expression upon it and you felt that no emotions had ever drawn lines about the mouth or between the brows. Either he had never felt any or his control was such that he could suppress all feeling. There was the same placidity you see in the face of Buddha.

There was something odd about his eyes -- I couldn't make out their color. They seemed to be filmed as though with a cat's third eyelid. Light blue, I thought, or gray, and curiously dull.

He gave me a strong handshake and collapsed into an overstaffed chair, hoisted his feet to a hassock. Grunting, he blinked at me with his dull stare. There was a curious clumsiness to his motions, and when he spoke, a curious ponderous quality in his diction. He seemed to feel something like indulgent contempt for the rest of the world. It was all right, I suppose. Nobody had better reason. The man was a genius.

"Glad you're here, Mr. Cortland," he said hoarsely. "I need you. Not for your intelligence which is slight. Not for your physical abilities, obviously sapped by years of wasteful and juvenile dissipation. But I have an excellent reason to think we may work well together."

"I was sent to get an interview for Spread," I told him.

"You were not." De Kalb raised a forefinger. "You err through ignorance, sir. Robert Allister, the publisher of Spread is a friend of mine. He has money. He has agreed to do the world and me a service. You are under contract to him, so you do as he says. He says you will work with me. Is that clear?"

"Lucid," I told him. "Except I don't work that way. The contract says I'm to handle news assignments. I read the fine print too. There was no mention of peonage."

"This is a news assignment. I shall give you an interview. But first, the Record. I see no point in futile discussion. Dr. Essen, will you be kind enough -- " He nodded toward a cupboard.

She got out a parcel wrapped in cloth, handed it to De Kalb. He held it on his knee, unopened, tapped his fingers on its top. It was about the size and shape of a portable typewriter case.

"I have showed the contents of this," he said, "only to Dr. Essen. And -- "

"I am convinced," Dr. Essen said dryly. "Oh yes, Ira. I am convinced I"

"Now I show it to you," De Kalb said and held out the package. "Put it on the table -- so. Now draw up a chair. Remove the wrappings. Excellent. And now -- "

They were both leaning forward, watching me expectantly. I glanced from them to the battered box, then back again. It was a tarnished blue-white rectangle, battered, smudged with dirt, perfecly plain.

"It is of no known metal," De Kalb said. "Some alloy, I think. It was found fifteen years ago in an excavation in Crete and sent to me unopened. Not intentionally. Nobody has ever been able to open it until recently. It is, as you may have guessed, a puzzle box. It took me fourteen years to learn the trick that would unlock it. It is also apparently indestructible. I shall now perform the trick for you."

His hands moved upon the battered surface. I saw his nails whiten now and then as he put pressure on it.

"Now," he said. "It opens. But I shall not watch. Letta, will you? No, I think it will be better for us both if we look away while Mr. Cortland -- "

I stopped listening along about then. For the box was slowly opening.

It opened like a jewel. Or like an unfolding flower that had as many facets as a jewel. I had expected a lid to lift but nothing of the sort happened. There was movement. There were facets and planes sliding and shifting and turning as though hinged, but what had seemed to be a box changed and reassembled and unfolded before me until it was -- what? As much a jewel as anything. Angles, planes, a shape and a shining.

Simultaneously there was motion in my own mind. As a tuning fork responds to a struck note, so something like a vibration bridged the gap between the box and my brain. As a book opens, as leaves turn, a book opened and leaves turned in my mind.

All time compressed itself into that blinding second. There was a shifting reorientation, motions infinitely fast that fitted and meshed with such precision the book and my mind were one.

The Record opened itself inside my brain. Complete, whole, a history and a vision, it hung for that one instant lucid and detailed in my mind. And for that moment outside time I did comprehend. But the mind could not retain it all. It flashed out and burned along my nerves and then it faded and was only a pulse, a glimpse, hanging on like an after-image in my memory. I had seen -- and forgotten.

But I had not forgotten everything.

Across a gulf of inconceivable eons a Face looked at me from red sky and empty earth. The Face of Ea ...

The room spun around me.

"Here," Dr. Essen's voice murmured at my shoulder. I looked up dizzily, took the glass of brandy she offered. I'm not sure now whether or not I had a moment of unconsciousness. I know my eyes blurred and the room tilted before me. I drank the brandy gratefully.

---

De Kalb said, Tell us what you saw."

"You -- you've seen it too?" The brandy helped but I wasn't yet steady. I didn't want to talk about what had flashed through my mind in that unending, dissolving glimpse which was slipping fragment by fragment out of my memory as I sat there. And yet I did want to talk.

"I've seen it," De Kalb's ponderous nod was grim. "Letta Essen has seen it. Now you. Three of us. We all get the same thing and yet -- details differ. Three witnesses to the same scene tell three different stories. Each sees with a different brain. Tell us how it seemed to you."

I swirled the brand around in my glass. My thoughts swirled with it, hot and potent as the liquor and as volatile. Give me ten minutes more, I thought, and they'll evaporate.

"Red sky," I said slowly. "Empty landscape. And -- " The word stuck in my throat. I couldn't name it.

"The Face," De Kalb supplied impatiently. "Yes, I know. Go on."

"The Face of Ea," I said. "How do I know its name? Ea and time -- time -- " Suddenly the brandy splashed across my hand. I was shaking with reaction so violent I could not control it and I was shaking because of time. I got the glass to my lips, using both hands, and drained what was left.

The second reaction passed and I thought I had myself under control.

"Time," I said deliberately, letting the thought of it pour through my mind in a long, cold, dark-colored tide that had no motion. Time hasn't, of course. But when you see it as I did, at first the concept makes the brain rock in your skull.

"Time -- ahead of our time. Uncountable thousands of years in our future. It was all there, wasn't it? The civilizations rising and falling one after another until -- the last city of all. The City of the Face."

"You saw it was a city?" De Kalb leaned forward quickly. "That's good. That's very good. It took me three times to find that out."

"It didn't see it. I -- I just knew."

I closed my eyes. Before me the empty landscape floated, dark, almost night, under the dim red sky.

I knew the Face was enormous. The side of some mountain had been carved away to reveal it and, I supposed, carved with tools by human hands. But you had the feeling that the Face must always have been there, that one day it had wakened in the rock and given one great grimace of impatience and the mountainside had sloughed away from its features, leaving Ea to look out into eternity over the red night of the world.

"There are people inside," I said. "I could feel them, being there. Feel their thoughts, I suppose. People in an enormous city, a metropolis behind the Face."

"Not a metropolis," De Kalb said. "A nekropolis. There's a difference. But -- yes, it's a city."

"Streets," I said dreamily, sniffing the empty glass. "Levels of homes and public buildings. People moving, living, thinking. What do you mean, nekropolis?"

"Tell you later. Go on."

"I wish I could. It's fading." I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features.

"Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?"

"A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny -- and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand."

"But -- the future!" I said. "That box -- didn't you say it was found in Crete? Dug up in old ruins? How could something from the past be a record of our own future? It doesn't make sense."

"Very little makes sense, sir, when you come to examine the nature of time." De Kalb's voice was ponderous again. He heaved himself up a little and folded his thick fingers, looking at me above them with veiled gray eyes.

"Have you read Spengler, Mr. Cortland?" he asked.

I grimaced and nodded.

"I know, I know. He has a high irritant value. But the man had genius, just the same. His concept of the community, moving through its course from 'culture' to dead and petrifying 'civilization' is what happened to the city of the Face.

"I said 'happened' because I have to use the past tense for that nekropolis of the future. It exists. It has accomplished itself in time as fully as Babylon or Rome. And the men in it are not men at all in the sense we know. They are gods."

He looked at me as if he expected me to object. I said nothing.

"They are gods," He went on. "Spengler was wrong, of course, in thinking of any human progress in one simple, romantic curve. You have only to compare fourteenth century Rome with sixteenth century Rome to see that a nekropolis, as Mumford calls it, can pull itself together and become a metropolis again, a living, vital unit in human culture.

"I have no quarrel with Spengler in his interpretations of a culture within itself. But both he and Toynbee went astray in their ideas of the symbolic value of a city. When you go further into the Record you'll see what I mean."

He paused, put out a large hand and fumbled in a dish of fruit on the table at his elbow. He found an orange and peered at it dubiously, hefted it once or twice, then closed his fingers over it and went on with his discourse.

"In a moment," he said, "I want to show you something with this orange as an illustration. First, however, I must do Spengler the justice of allowing the validity of his theories, in the ultimate. The City of the Face has run its course. It is a nekropolis, in the sense that Mumford uses the term.

"In our times, a nekropolis such as Rome once was, and such as New York must be someday, needn't mean the end of our civilization, because a city isn't a whole nation. There were outlying villages that flourished all the better when Rome ceased to dominate their world. When the dark ages closed over Europe it wasn't by any means the end of the civilized world -- elsewhere on the planet new cultures were rising and old ones flourishing. But the City of the Face is a very different matter.

"That City is really Nekropolis and there are no outlying villages to carry on, no outlying cultures rising toward fruition. In all that world there is only the one great City where mankind survives. And they aren't men -- they are gods. Gods, sir!"

"Then it can't really be a nekropolis," I objected.

"It need not be. That's up to us."

"How?"

"You saw my hearth. Dr. Essen showed you the stain of plague that is creeping across it. Oh yes, my friend, that stain is spreading! Slowly, but with a rate of growth that increases as it goes. The negative matter -- no, not even negative. Not even that. But it happened to the world of the Face. That whole planet is nekronic matter except for the City itself.

"You didn't sense that from your first experience with the Record? No? You will. The people in the City can't save themselves by direct action on the world around them. They appeal to us. We can save them. I don't yet know how. But they know or they wouldn't have appealed in just the way they did."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Let me get this straight. You're asking me to accept a lot, you know. The only premise I've got to believe in is the -- the Record. But what do you want from me, personally? How do I come into it? Why me?"

De Kalb shifted in his chair, sighed heavily, opened his fingers and peered at the orange he held as if he had never seen it before. He grimaced.

"Sir, you're right. I accept the rebuke. Let me give you facts. Item, the Record. It is, in effect, a book. But not a book made by human minds. And it must, as you know, be experienced, not read. Each time you open the box you will get the same flash of complete vision, and each time you will forget a little less as your mind is conditioned. But there will always be facets of that tremendous story which will elude us, I think. Our minds can never wholly grasp what lies inside that box ...

"It was found in Crete. It had lain there perhaps three thousand years, perhaps five thousand -- I think, myself, a million. It came into my hands half by accident. I could not open it. Off and on I tried. That is my habit. I used X-rays to look through the substance of the box. Of course I saw nothing.

"I detected radioactivity, and I tested it with certain of the radio-elements. I exposed it to supersonics. I -- well, I tried many things. Something worked. Something clicked the safety, so that one day it opened. You see -- " He looked at me gravely. "You see, it was time."

"Time?"

"That box was made with a purpose, obviously. It was sent to us, with a message. I say to us but the aim was less direct. It was sent through time, Mr. Cortland -- through time itself -- and the address said simply, 'To be opened only by a skilled technological civilization.' "

"All right," I said. "Suppose it came through time. Suppose it's an appeal for help. I didn't get that, but I'm willing to believe I might if I opened the box often enough. But why do you assume this is a living issue, here and now? You imply the fate of the City depends on us. If that box is as old as you say, isn't it more likely the City of the Face existed somewhere in the prehistoric past?

"They made a record -- I can't deny that. They cast it adrift in time like a note in a bottle and it floated ashore here and we read it. Sure. But it makes a good enough news-story for me the logical way -- a relic of a dead civilization a million years old. That I could write. But -- "

"You are not here to write a news story, sir!" De Kalb's voice was sharp.

"That's what my contract says I'm here for."

"You were chosen," De Kalb said heavily. "You were chosen. Not by Allister. Not by me." He shifted uneasily. "Let me go on a little." He peered at the orange, tossed it up and caught it with a smack in his palm. "I opened the box for the first time," he said, "in my studio.

"You've seen it. I saw the box unfolding like a flower. For the first time in a million years -- opening up in four dimensions, or perhaps more than four, with that tesseract motion which the eye can only partly see. But that first time, sir -- something more happened." He paused, hesitated, said in a reluctant voice, "Something came out of the box."

I waited. Dr. Essen, who had scarcely moved since this talk began, got up abruptly and went to stand at the window, her back to us, looking out over the great brown tumble of mountains beyond.

"It came out of the box," De Kalb said in a rapid voice, as if he didn't want to talk about this and was determined to get it over as fast as he could. "It passed me. It leaped toward the fireplace. And it was gone. When I looked, I saw nothing. But that evening I noticed the first spot of the stain upon the stone. In the stone. It meant little to me then -- I had not yet learned enough from the Record to be afraid. But I know now."

---

Again I waited. This time I had to prompt him.

"Know what?"

"The nekron," he said. "It's growing. It will never stop growing, until -- " He paused, shrugged. "We have to believe they're in the future," he said. "We have to help them. They made sure of that. For unless we do the nekron will grow and grow until our world is like theirs -- dead matter. Inert. Nekronic. I call it that because it is death.

"An absolutely new form of matter, the death of energy. It breaks a supreme law of our universe, the law of increasing entropy. Entropy trends toward chaos, naturally. But the nekron is the other extreme, a pattern, a dead null-energy pattern of negation."

"You mean," I demanded, "that the people of the City deliberately set a trap for the man who first opened the box?"

"They had to. They had to make sure we'd answer their appeal to save ourselves."

"Then you're convinced they exist in the future, not the past?"

"You saw the Face. You were aware, you say, of the waves of civilization rising and falling between our time and theirs? How can you doubt it, then, Mr. Cortland?"

I was silent, remembering.

"It doesn't matter," De Kalb went on. "That question is purely academic. Past or future is all one in the time-fabric you will understand better after you've opened the box again."

"But," I said, "how can we help them? If they can't destroy the menace to their own world, whatever it is, how could we? It's ridiculous. And anyhow, if time-travel was possible for the box -- which I don't for a moment really accept -- how could it be possible for tangible, living men from our time? And if it were, how could you be sure you weren't dashing off to save a city that would prove when you found it to be already dead? Overwhelmed a million years ago? How is it -- "

"No, no, Mr. Cortland!" De Kalb held up a large hand with an orange balanced on its palm. "You have so much to learn! Allow me the intelligence to think of those objections myself! Surely you don't imagine all that hadn't occurred to me already?

"The answer is that the nekron can be destroyed -- or at least that the problem it poses can be solved. I believe it can be solved only by this method -- three men and one woman must go into the future age that holds the Face of Ea. For that, apparently, was the original plan of the people of the Face."

"What makes you so certain of that?"

"A number of factors. The Record was sent to our civilization, remember?"

I had him there. "But it was found in Cretan ruins, you said."

"Certainly. And the ancient Minoans didn't open it. I suspect the Record existed long before the time of Theseus -- but it remained unopened until a neotechnical civilization had developed on this planet. Only men -- and women -- who were products of such a culture would have the qualities necessary to solve the nekronic problem."

"Why didn't they send the Record directly to our era? Why did they miss the right time by thousands of years?"

"I am no expert in the specialized restrictions of time-traveling," De Kalb said, with some irritation. "It may be that too-accurate aim is impossible. How can I tell that? The Record reached the right hands. I can easily prove that."

But I was searching for errata. "You said we'd have the qualities that could solve the nekronic problem -- destroy it, I suppose you mean. Well? Have you solved it?"

De Kalb lost his ill-temper and beamed at me. "No," he said. "Not yet. The nekronic matter itself is very curious -- atypical, completely. It is absolutely nonreactive. It has no spectrum. It emits no energy. No known reagent affects it in the slightest degree. It is a new type of matter, plain and simple. I cannot destroy it -- not yet. Not now. But I believe I can do it with the guidance and aid of the people of the Face. As a matter of -- "

The telephone on the table beside him buzzed sharply. Dr. Essen swung around with a start. De Kalb grunted, nodded at her, muttered, "I'm afraid so," as if in answer to a question and took up the telephone with his free hand.

It sputtered at him.

"All right, put him on," De Kalb said in a resigned voice. The receiver buzzed and sputtered again. De Kalb's placid features grimaced, smoothed out, grimaced again. "Now Murray," he said. "Now Murray -- no, wait a minute! Confound it, Murray, allow me to -- I know you are, but -- "

The telephone would not let him speak. It crackled angrily, a word now and then coming out clearly. De Kalb listened in resigned silence. Finally he heaved himself up in the chair and spoke with sudden resolution.

"Murray," he said sharply, "Murray, listen to me. Cortland's here."

The phone crackled. De Kalb grinned. "I know you don't," he said. "Probably Cortland doesn't like you either. That's not important. Murray, can you come up here? Yes, it is important. I have something to show you." He hesitated, glanced at Dr. Essen, shrugged. "I am casting the die, Murray," he said. "I want to show you a certain box."

"You know Colonel Harrison Murray?" De Kalb asked. I nodded. I knew and disliked him for personal qualities quite apart from his ability. He was old army, West Point, a martinet. He had the violent, uncontrolled emotions of an hysterical woman and the mechanical brilliance of a -- well, a robot.

No one could deny his genius. He prided himself on being scrupulously just, which he wasn't. But he thought he was. A fine technician, a genius at strategy and tactics. He confirmed that in the Pacific, back in '45. I'd done a profile on him once and he hadn't liked it at all.

"You're taking him in on this?" I asked.

"I've got to. He can make it too hot for me unless he understands. You see, I've been working with him on -- never mind. But he insists I go on with it. He can't see how important this new business is."

"Ira." Dr. Essen put in timidly. "Ira, do you really think it's wise? To bring the colonel in yet, I mean. Are you sure?"

"You know I'm not, Letta." He frowned. "But there's so little time to be lost, now. I don't dare wait any longer. Mr. Cortland -- " He swung around toward me. "Mr. Cortland, I see it is now time to give you one more bit of knowledge. I have a story to tell you, about myself and you. Surely you must have realized by now that you are involved in this thing far beyond any power of mine to accept or dismiss."

I nodded. I did know that. I thought briefly of the things that had happened to me in Rio, of the affinity I had sensed without understanding between that stain on the hearthstone and the -- the creature which had scorched my hand in Rio and the deaths that had come after. Would they stop now -- in Rio? Would they begin again, nearer home? There had to be some connection -- coincidence just doesn't stretch that far. But all I could do was wait.

"This is my story," De Kalb said. "Our story, Mr. Cortland. Yours and mine, Dr. Essen's -- perhaps Colonel Murray's too. I don't know. I wish I did. Well, I'll get on with it." He sighed heavily. "After I had experienced the Record many times," he said "I began to realize that there was in it reference to a certain spot on the earth's surface that had a rather mystifying importance.

"I was unable to grasp why. The place was localized by latitude, longitude, various methods of cross-reference. It took me a long while to work it out in terms of our own world and era and decimal system. But finally I did it.

"I went there." He paused, regarding me gravely. "Have you ever been in the Laurentians, Mr. Cortland? Do you know the wildness of those mountains? So near here by air, and so far off in another world, once you arrive and the sound of your motor ceases. You imagine then that you can hear the silences of the arctic wastes, which are all that lie beyond that band of northern forests.

"Well, I hired men. I sank a shaft. They thought I was simply a prospector with more money and fewer brains than most. Fortunately they didn't know my real reason -- that the spot I was hunting had turned out to be underground. You get some curious superstitions up there in the wilds -- perhaps not curious. In many ways they're wise men. But my spot, in this era at least, had to be dug for.

"My instruments showed me a disturbance toward which the shaft was angled. And eventually we came to the source of that disturbance. We found it. We hollowed a cavern around it. After that I dismissed the men and settled down to study the thing I had found." He laughed abruptly.

"It was twenty feet of nothing, Mr. Cortland. An oval of disturbance, egg-shaped, cloudy to the eye. I could walk through it. But, inside that oval, space and matter were walled off from our own space and matter by a barrier that was, I know now, supra-dimensional. A man may move from light to dark, encountering no barrier -- yet the difference is manifest. There were tremendous differences here.

"Also there was something inside. I was convinced of that long before I got my first glimpse of it. I tried many things. It was finally under a bombardment of UV that I saw the first shadowy shape inside that nothingness. I increased the power, I decreased it, I played with the vernier like a violinist on a Stradivarius.

"I chased that elusive mystery up and down through the light bands like a cat on a mouse's trail. And at last, quite clearly, I saw -- " He broke off, grinning at me.

"No, I shall not tell you yet what I saw," he said. "You wouldn't believe me. The moment has now come, Mr. Cortland, when I must give you a little lesson on the nature of time." He held up the orange, revolving it slowly between his fingers.

"A sphere," he said, "revolving on an axis. Call it Earth." He put out his other hand and took up from the fruit bowl a silver knife with a leaf-shaped blade a little broader than the orange. With great deliberation he slid the edge through the rind.

---

What happened then came totally without warning. In one moment I sat comfortably in my chair watching De Kalb drew the knife-blade through the orange. In the next --

A blinding nova of pure energy exploded outward from a nexus in the center of my body.

The room ceased to be. De Kalb and Dr. Essen were unrealities far off at the periphery of that exploding nova. Vitality ran like fire through every nerve and vein, like an adrenalin charge inconceivably magnified. There was nothing in the world for one timeless moment but the bursting glow of that experience for which I have no name.

The first thing I saw when the room came back into focus around me was the blood running from De Kalb's hand.

It meant nothing to me, in that first instant. Blood is the natural concomitant of death, and I knew that somewhere not far away a man had died a moment before. Then my senses came back and I sat up abruptly, staring at De Kalb's face.

The color had drained out of it. He was looking at his cut hand with a blank unseeing gaze. There was a little blood on the silver knife. It was nothing. He had only cut himself slightly because of --

Because of --

Our eyes met. I think the knowledge came simultaneously into our minds in that meeting of glances. He had felt it too. The explosion of white energy had burst outward in his nerve centers in the same moment it burst in mine. Neither of us spoke. It wasn't necessary.

After what seemed a long while I looked at Dr. Essen. That bright steel glance of hers met mine squarely but there was only bewilderment in it.

"What happened?" she asked.

The sound of her voice seemed to release us both from our speechlessness.

"You don't know?" De Kalb swung around to look at her. "No, evidently you don't. But Mr. Cortland and I -- Cortland, how often have you -- " He groped for words.

"Since the first of the deaths in Rio," I said flatly. "You?"

"Since the first of them here. And ever since, though, very faintly, when they happened in Rio."

"What are you talking about?" Dr. Essen demanded.

Heavily, speaking with deliberation, De Kalb told her.

"For myself," he finished, glancing at me, "it began when I first opened the Record." He paused, looked at his hand with some surprise and, laying down orange and knife, pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around the bleeding cut. "I didn't feel that at all," he said, almost to himself.

And then, to me, "I opened the Record. I told you that -- something -- went by me very fast and vanished at the spot where that nekronic strain later came into existence." He looked at me soberly, his eyes narrowed. "Mr. Cortland," he said, "can you tell me that you did not experience any feeling of recognition when you first saw that stain on the hearth?"

I got up so suddenly that my chair almost tipped over. Violently I said, "De Kalb, somewhere a man has just died! Something killed him. Something is making you and me accessories to murder! We've got to put a stop to it! This isn't an academic discussion -- it's murder! We -- "

"Sit down, Mr. Cortland, sit down." De Kalb's voice was tired. "I know quite well it's murder. We must and will discover the truth about it. But not by shouting at one another. The truth lies in that box on the table. It lies somewhere very far in the future.

"Also, the truth is a being that roams our world, murdering at will. I released it, Mr. Cortland. Unwittingly, but I released it. That was a Pandora's box I opened. Trouble and death came out of it. We can only pray that there is hope in the bottom of it, as there was in Pandora's box."

"Look," I said. "Tell me how I can help and I'll do it. But let's not have any more generalities. I'm too close to these deaths. I think I'm in personal danger. Maybe you are too. What can we do?"

"We are not in personal danger from the killer. From the law -- perhaps -- if this connection from which we suffer were to become known. What can we do? I wish I could tell you. I'm sure of this much -- that thing which came from the box, leaving the stain of nekronic matter like a footprint behind it, is a living and dangerous creature. It touched me as it went by. I think by that touch I've become -- well, remotely akin to it. Were you touched too?"

I told him.

"Very well," he said. "We are in danger. Has it occurred to you yet that where it touched the hearthstone, the nekron took root?"

For a moment I didn't see what he meant. Then the implication hit me and I went cold and empty inside. De Kalb, seeing the look on my face, laughed shortly.

"I see it has. Very well. So far I haven't detected any sign of nekronic infection in myself. I assume you haven't either. But that proves nothing."

"Have you seen the creature?" I asked. He hesitated. "I can't be sure. I think I have. Will you tell me exactly what happened to you, please? Every detail, even the irrelevant."

And when I had finished, he exchanged troubled glances with Dr. Letta Essen. "Directive intelligence, then," she said.

"The way it moved," De Kalb murmured. "That's highly significant. And the impossibility of getting a firm grip on the creature. So -- Letta, do you agree?"

"Frictional burns?" she asked. "But it didn't move fast enough to cause those. That is -- not spatially."

"Not in space, no," De Kalb said. "But in time? Limited, of course. A few seconds' leeway would be enough if you consider the energy expended and the tremendous velocities involved. It looks like a shadow -- it seems to have mass without weight -- and it has high velocity without spatial motion.

"And Mr. Cortland's tightening his grip on the creature seemed to push it away. Time-movement, then! It vibrates -- it has an oscillating period of existence, certainly limited within a range of a few seconds. A tuning-fork vibrates in space. Why not vibration through time -- with an extremely narrow range?

"No wonder you couldn't hold the creature! Could you hold a metal rod vibrating that rapidly? You would get frictional burns on your hands -- since your own weight would prevent you from partaking of its motion. The being's existence must be, to a limited degree, extra-temporal.

"Consequently, I suppose any weapon used against it would have to be keyed to its own temporal periodicity. That is, if we had a pistol oscillating in time, we might be able to shoot the creature. But the hand that squeezed the trigger might have to be oscillating too."

"Trembling like a leaf," I said. "I know mine would be."

He brushed that away. "How intelligent is this killer? Is ego involved, or merely vampirism? If the creature read your mind -- " He grimaced. "No. No! The missing factor is what the nekron itself is and its special qualities. And we don't know that. We probably never will until we go to the Face of Ea."

I sighed. I sat down. I'd had too many jolts in the past half hour to feel very sure of myself.

"So we travel in time," I said wearily "Mr. De Kalb -- you're crazy."

He had enough energy left to chuckle rather wanly.

"You'll think me even crazier, sir, when I tell you what it was I saw down there under the mountain, in the cavern. But I must finish my demonstration before you'll be able to understand."

"Get on with it, then."

He took up orange and knife again. He fitted the blade into the cut and finished the job of bisecting the fruit a little above its equator. The severed top half lay upon the blade as on a narrow plate. Below it he held the other half of the orange in place, so that it still maintained its unbroken sphere.

"Consider this blade Flatland," he said. "A world of two dimensions, intersecting the three-dimensional sphere. Now if I revolve the lower half of the orange, you will please imagine that the upper half revolves with it. One fruit -- you see? The axis remains immovable in relation to the plane in Flatland it intersects.

"Now. I cut this lower half again, straight through. The same axis intersects the same point on this Flatland. In other words, the spatial axis remains stable. You understand so far?"

"No," I said. He grinned, tossed knife and fruit back into the bowl.

"It takes thinking," he said. "Let me go on. Now time is also a sphere. Time revolves. And time has an axis -- a single stable extension of a temporal point, drawn through past and future alike, intersecting them all, as that knife-blade touched the orange everywhere in the Flatland dimension. And that, Mr. Cortland, is what makes travel in time theoretically valid.

"The theory of time-travel usually ignores space. The traveler steps into some semi-magical machine, presses a button and emerges a thousand years in the future -- but on earth!" He snorted. "In a thousand years, or a thousand days, or in one day, or one minute, this planet along with the whole solar system would have traveled far beyond its position at the moment the traveler entered his machine.

"But there is one point from which he could enter the machine, enter time itself and be sure always of emerging on earth. For each planet, I think, there is one single point. The spot in the Laurentians where I saw -- what I saw was that point for our planet. It is the spot at which the axis of the time-sphere intersects our own three-dimensional world. If it were possible to follow the line of the particular axis you would move through time.

"Well, I believe there is movement but along still another dimension, beyond this theoretical fourth which is time -- or supertime. Call it a fifth. This much I'm sure of -- if you could stay in the time axis indefinitely the ultra-time drift would carry you into another era, through era beyond era, wherever other ages intersect the time axis." He shook his head.

"I admit I don't understand it too clearly. It's a science beyond ours. However, I think I can explain the presence of the Record box now. I believe the people of the Face sent it back in a direction parallel to the time-axis -- which, remember, intersects the same area in space always, at any given moment. They sent it very far back, millennia into our past -- as you say, like people tossing a message in a bottle into the stream of time.

"Look." He held up his hand, thumb and forefinger touching at the tips. "Two times -- my finger and thumb. But they touch at one point only. There you can cross. From the time of the Face to, let us say, some thousands of years B.C. This is vague again, and it is something I don't understand.

"The extension is along still another dimension, possibly the ultra-sphere, this figurative fifth. But it's logical to suppose there would be such a limitation. There is in space. You can step spatially only into areas spatially adjoining yours. And in time -- well, it may apply there too."

"All right," I said. "Okay up to now. I'll accept it. Now let's have the kicker. What was it you saw in your cave?"

De Kalb leaned back in his chair, regarding me with a grin.

"I saw you, Mr. Cortland."

I gaped at him.

His grin broadened.

"Yes, I saw you, lying alseep on the floor of the -- the egg. I saw myself there too, asleep. I saw Dr. Essen. And lastly I saw Colonel Harrison Murray."

He looked at me with obscure triumph, his grin very wide.

"You're crazy," I said bluntly.

"You're thinking you've never been in a cavern under a Laurentian mountain, I suppose. Very likely. Nor has Dr. Essen. Nor, I imagine, Murray. But you will be, my friend. So will we all." The grin faded. Now the deep voice was graver. "And we are all changed, there in the egg. You understand that?

"We are older, by a little, not temporally, but in experience. You can see that on our faces. We have all passed through strange experiences -- good, bad, awe-inspiring, perhaps. And the men look -- tired, older. But Dr. Essen looks strangely younger." He shrugged heavily. "I don't attempt to explain it. I can only report what I saw," He smiled at me.

"Well, so much for that. Don't look so stunned, Mr. Cortland! I assure you it was yourself. Which means that you will go with us when we take our great leap into the future, into the world of the Face. I believe we will all stand together in the living flesh before that great Face we have seen only in our minds, today.

"Believe? I know it. Those people lying asleep in the time-axis, with instruments on the floor around them to regulate their slumbers, will go forward in time -- have gone forward. And they will return in the end to here and now.

"They will go as the box went. From the here and now, forward through the time-axis to the world of the Face. But there is no backward flow along that axis. No one can risk meeting himself in his own past, even if such a thing were possible. So when we return, we must come as the box did, along a path which is parallel to the axis, to that continuous point in time which may be millennia B.C., where the box originally emerged.

"In effect, one goes forward with the flow along the time axis and back around the circumference of the sphere which is time. And there we enter the time-axis chamber again, and are carried forward along the flow to our own present time." He smiled.

"Do you see what that means? It means that one day those four in the Laurentian cavern will waken. And as they wake, as they step out, three men and a woman will enter the chamber and begin their journey into time!"

I gave my head a quick shake. Images were whirling in it like sparks from a Fourth-of-July pinwheel. None of them made sense to me, or perhaps only one. But that one was definite.

"Oh no they won't," I said.

"Why not?"

"I will quote you a vulgarism," I said meticulously. "There may be flies on some of you guys, but there ain't no flies on me. I'm not going. I know when I'm well off. Jerry Cortland is staying right here with both feet firm upon his own temporal axis. I will write you the best story you ever saw about yourself, Mr. De Kalb, but I won't climb on any merry-go-rounds with you. Is that clear?"

He chuckled deeply.

"But you did, Mr. Cortland -- you did!"

---

Colonel Harrison Murray, at sixty, still had a fine military figure and was proud of it. You could see him remember to throw his shoulders back and pull in his waist about once every ten minutes. Then age and the subject at hand would gradually divert him and he would sag slowly -- until he remembered again.

He had a discontented drooping mouth, a face all flat slab-shaped planes and an incongruously high thin voice that got higher when he was angry, which was most of the time. He was angry now.

"A man can't help it if he was born a fool, De Kalb," he said. "But luckily we're not all fools. You're going to drop this idiotic sideline of yours, whatever it is, and go back to work on our current job. You agreed to assist the War Department -- " He gave me a quick, wary glance. "You agreed to do a certain job."

"I've done it," De Kalb told him. I've set up the Bureau and laid out all the plans. Oh, it's no secret -- we're not the only ones who've been experimenting along this line. I'll be willing to bet Mr. Cortland knows more than you think about this top-secret Bureau of ours. How about that?"

He was looking at me. I said, "Well, I've heard rumors on the grapevine. Hypnotism, isn't it?"

Murray swore softly. De Kalb chuckled.

"Subliminal hypnosis," he said. "It doesn't matter, Colonel. The important secrets are the specialized techniques that have been worked out and they're still under cover -- I hope. The Bureau is operating efficiently now. I've set up the plan. Now there are competent researchers doing quite as much as I could do. If I stayed on now it would simply be as a figurehead. My usefulness was over when I explained my theories to the technicians and psychologists who were able to apply them."

"Allow me to decide that," Murray said angrily and there was a pause.

Quietly, from her chair by the window, Dr. Essen spoke. "Ira, perhaps if Colonel Murray saw the Record -- "

"Of course," De Kalb said. "No use squabbling any further. Cortland, will you do the honors this time?"

I opened the cupboard door. I took down the wrapped bundle which was the box. I set it on the table between De Kalb and Murray. The Colonel looked suspiciously at it.

"If this is some childish joke -- " he began.

"I assure you, sir, it's no joke. It is something the like of which you've never seen before, but there's nothing humorous about it. I think when you've looked into this -- this package -- you'll have no further objections to the problem I'm working on."

De Kalb undid the wrappings. The stained and battered box, blue-white, imperishable as the time-currents upon which it had drifted so long, lay there before us, the universe and the destiny of man locked inside it.

De Kalb's fingers moved upon its surface. There was a faint, distant ringing as if the hinges moved to a sound of music and the box unfolded like a flower.

I didn't watch. I knew I'd get nothing further from it now until my mind had rested a little. I looked at the ceiling instead, where the lights from the unfolded leaves and facets of the Record moved in intricate patterns on the white plaster. Even that was hypnotic.

It was very quiet in the room. The silence of the end of the world seemed to flow out of the box in waves, engulfing all sound except for De Kalb's heavy breathing and the quick rasping breath that came and went as Murray sat motionless, staring at the flicker of lights that had been lit at the world's end and sent back to us along the circumference of time.

I found that I was holding myself tense in that silence. I was waiting -- waiting for the nova to burst again inside me, perhaps. Waiting for another killing, perhaps somewhere in my sight this time, perhaps someone in this room. And I was waiting for one thing more -- the first spreading coldness that might hint to me that my own flesh, like the stone of the studio hearth, had given root to the nekron.

The box closed. The lights vanished from the ceiling.

Murray very slowly sat upright in his chair ...

De Kalb leaned back heavily, his curiously dull eyes full on Murray's face.

"And that's the whole story," he said.

It had taken over an hour of quick, incisive questions and painstaking answers to present Murray with a complete picture of the situation in which he himself played so curious a part. We all watched his face, searching, I think, for some sign of the tremendous intellectual and emotional experience through which everyone must go who opened that box.

Nothing showed. It was the stranger because I knew Murray was almost a hysteric, psychologically. Perhaps he'd learned to control himself when he had to. Certainly he showed nothing of emotion as he shot his cold, watchful questions at De Kalb.

"And you recognized me," he said now, narrowing his eyes at De Kalb. "I was in that -- that underground room?"

"You were."

Murray regarded him quietly, his mouth pulled downward in a curve of determination and anger.

"De Kalb," he said, "you tell a good story. But you're a grasshopper. You always have been. You lose interest in every project as soon as you think you've solved it. Now listen to me a minute. The indoctrination project you were working on with me is not yet fully solved. I know you think so. But it isn't. I see exactly what's happened. Hypnosis as an indoctrination method has led you off onto this wild scheme. You intend to use hypnosis on whatever guinea-pigs you can enlist and -- "

"It isn't true, Murray, It isn't true." De Kalb was not even indignant, only weary. "You saw the Record. You know."

"All right," Murray admitted after a moment. "I saw the Record. Very well. Suppose you can go forward in time. Suppose you step out, back in the here and now, ten seconds after you step in. You say no time is lost. But what energy you'll lose, De Kalb! You'll be a different man, older, tired, full of experiences. Disinterested, maybe, in my project. I can't let you do it. I'll have to insist you finish that first and then do what you like on this Record deal of yours."

"It can't be done, Murray," De Kalb said. "You can't get around it that way. I saw you in the time-chamber, remember. You did go."

Murray put up an impatient hand. "Is this telephone connected with the exchange? Thanks. I can't argue with you, De Kalb. I have a job to do."

We all sat quiet, watching him as he put a number through. He got his departmental headquarters. He got the man he wanted.

"Murray speaking," he said .briskly. "I'm at De Kalb's in Connecticut. You know the place? I'm leaving immediately in my plane. I want you to check me in as soon as I get there, probably around three. I'm bringing a man named Cortland with me, newspaper fellow -- you know his work? Good? Now listen, this is important." Murray took a deep breath and regarded me coldly over the telephone. Very distinctly he said into it.

"Cortland is responsible for that series of murders he reported from Brazil. I'm bringing him in for questioning."

---

I didn't like the way he flew his plane. His hands kept jiggling with the controls, his feet kept adjusting and readjusting the tail-flaps so that the ship was in constant, unnecessary side motion in the air, Murray was nervous.

I looked down at the trees, the tilted mountain slopes, the roads shining in the sun, with little glittering black dots sliding along it that were cars.

"You know you can't get away with this, Murray," I said. It was, I think, almost the first thing I had said to him since we took off half an hour ago. After all, there had been little to say. The situation was out of all our hands, as Murray had meant it to be, from the moment he spoke into the telephone.

"I have got away with it, Cortland," he said, not looking at me.

"De Kalb has connections as powerful as yours," I told him. "Besides, I think I can prove I'm not responsible for those deaths."

"I think you are, Cortland. If there's any truth in what De Kalb was saying, I believe you're a carrier."

"But you're not doing this because you think I'm guilty. You're doing it to stop De Kalb."

"Certainly." He snapped his lips shut. I shrugged. That, of course, was obvious.

We flew on in silence. Murray was uneasy, perhaps from the experience of the Record. I think now that he had entirely shut his mind to that. I think he was denying it had ever happened. But his hands and feet still jittered on the controls until I itched to take the plane away from him and fly it myself.

It was a nice little ship, a six-passenger job that could have flown alone, almost, as any good plane can do in smooth air if the pilot will only let it. I would probably have said just then, if you'd asked me, that I was in plenty of trouble. My troubles hadn't started. They were about to.

The first intimation was the sound Murray made -- a sort of deep, startled, incredulous grunt. I stopped to turn toward him. And then -- time stopped.

I had a confused awareness that something was moving through the ship, something dark and frighteningly swift. But this time there was a difference. The thing I had first encountered in a Rio alley had returned. The first pulse of that nova of blinding brilliance burst outward from the core and center of my body. But it did not rise to its climactic explosion of pure violence. The energy suddenly was shut off at the source. The plane was empty of that monstrous intruder.

Beside me Murray hunched over the controls, slowly bending forward. I could not see his face. That instant of relief passed in a flashing time-beat.

Again the pulse throbbed through me. And again it was shut off. There was something terribly wrong with gravity. The earth stood upright in a blurred line that bisected the sky and was slowly, slowly toppling over from left to right. The weight of Murray's body, slumped heavily forward, was throwing the ship out of control.

I couldn't move -- not while those erratic jumping shocks kept pounding at me.

But I had to move. I had to get hold of the controls. And then, as I put forth all my strength, the explosion channeled into my brain -- different, somehow incomplete. I could feel a swiftly-fading ebb-tide draining into the empty void.

Then it was gone altogether.

Another part of my mind must have taken over then. And it must have been efficient. Myself, I seemed to be floating somewhere in a troubled void with the image of Murray's lolling head and limp arms. Murray -- dead. Dead? He must be dead. I knew that nekronic shock too well.

In the mindless void where my awareness floated I knew that I was a bad spot temporally. Jerry Cortland was in a bad spot. Murray's headquarters must be expecting him in already with a murder suspect in tow. I was the murder suspect and murder had been done again. And Murray and I had been alone in mid-air when it happened.

The efficient part of my mind knew what to do. I left it at that. I had no recollection whatever of fighting the plane out of its power dive or of turning in a long high circle as I got lost altitude back. But that must have happened. Time and distance meant nothing to the half of my mind that floated but the other half very efficiently flew the plane.

"All right now?" De Kalb's voice inquired.

I sat up shakily. The room was swimming around me but it was a familiar room, I could see Dr. Essen bending above a couch and I could see polished boots and a shoulder with something shiny on it. I must have brought Murray back. Murray -- dead?

"It was -- it was the nekron," I said thickly.

"I know, I know," De Kalb said. "You told us. Don't you remember?"

"I don't remember anything except Murray."

"I don't think we can save him," De Kalb said in a flat voice.

"Then he's alive?"

"Just."

We both looked automatically toward the couch, where Dr. Essen lifted a worried face.

"The adrenalin's helping," she said, "But there's no real improvement. He'll sink again as soon as the effect wears off."

"Can't we get him to a hospital?" I asked.

"I don't think medical treatment will help him," De Kalb said. "Dr. Essen has a medical degree, you know. She's already done everything the hospitals have tried on the other victims.

"That creature strikes a place that scalpels and oxygen and adrenalin can't reach. I don't know what or where, but neither do the doctors." He moved his shoulders impatiently. "This is the first time the killer hasn't finished its job. You interrupted it, you know -- somehow. Do you know how?"

"It was intermittent," I said hesitantly. "It kept going away and coming back." I explained in as much detail as I could. It wasn't easy.

"The plane was moving fast, eh?" De Kalb murmured. "So. Always before the victims have been practically immobilized. That might explain part of it. If the nekronic creature is vibrating through time it might need a fixed locus in space. And the plane was moving very fast in space. That could explain why the attack was incomplete -- but complete enough, after all."

I nodded. "This is going to be pretty hard to explain to Murray's headquarters," I said.

"There's been one call already," De Kalb told me. "I didn't say anything. I had to think." He struck his fist into his palm impatiently and exclaimed: "I don't understand it! I saw Murray with us in that cave! I saw him!"

"Has it occurred to you, Ira," Dr. Essen's gentle voice interrupted, "that what you may have seen in the time-chamber was Colonel Murray's dead body, not Colonel Murray asleep?"

He turned to stare at her.

"It seems clear to me," she went on, "that Mr. Cortland is a sort of catalyst in our affairs. From the moment he entered them things have speeded up rather frighteningly. I suggest it's time to make a definite forward move. What do you think, Ira?"

De Kalb frowned a little. "How's Murray?" he asked.

"He's dying," she said flatly. "I know of only one thing that could possibly postpone his death."

"The neo-hypnosis, you mean," De Kalb said. "Well, yes -- if it works. We've used it on sleeping subjects, of course, but with a man who is as far gone as Murray, I don't know."

"We can try," Dr. Essen said. "It's a chance. I don't think he'd ever have entered the time-axis of his own volition but this way we can take him along. Things are working out, Ira, very surprisingly."

"Can we keep him alive until we reach the shaft?" De Kalb asked.

"I think so. I can't promise but -- "

"We can't save him," De Kalb said. "The People of the Face -- maybe. And after all, Murray did go with us. I saw him. Mr. Cortland do you think that plane would carry the four of us as far as the Laurentians?"

"Obviously, Mr. De Kalb," I said with somewhat hysterical irony, "obviously, if I guess what you have in mind, it did!"

You could see the shaft-mouth from a long way up, dark above the paler slide of dug earth, and shadowed by the thick green of the Canadian mountains.

It was easier to spot from the air than to reach on foot.

We left the plane in a little clearing at the bottom of the slope. It seemed wildly reckless, but what else could we do? And we carried Murray's body up the mountain with us, De Kalb and I, while Dr. Essen, carrying a square case about two feet through, kept a watchful eye on the unconscious man. Once she had to administer adrenalin to Murray.

I still hadn't come to any decision. I could simply have walked away but that would have meant shutting the last door of escape behind me. I told myself that I'd think of some other way before the final decision had to be made. Meanwhile I went with the others.

"It wouldn't be as though I were running away from punishment," I told De Kalb wryly as we paused to catch our breath on the lip of the shaft. Tree-tops swayed and murmured below us, and the mountains were warm in the late, slanting sunlight of a summer evening.

"If your theories are right I won't be escaping from anything. The moment I step into your time-trap my alter ego steps out and goes on down the mountain to take his medicine. All I can say is I hope he has a fine alibi ready."

"He will have -- we will have," De Kalb said. "We'll have all time at our disposal to think one up in. Remember what our real danger is, Cortland -- the nekron. An infection of the mind. An infection of the earth itself and perhaps an infection in our own flesh, yours and mine.

"What it is that I turned loose on the world when I opened that box I don't yet know but I expect to know when I go down that mountain again -- ten minutes from now, a million years from now. Both." He shook his head.

"Let's get on with it," he said.

---

I don't think I ever really meant to embark on that fantastic journey along the time axis. I helped carry Colonel Murray's body down the dusty shaft but it was a nightmare I walked through, not a real experience. I knew at the bottom of the tunnel I'd wake up in my hotel in Rio.

At the foot of the shaft was a hollowed out room. Our flash-beams moved searchingly across the rough walls. We carried Murray into the cave and laid him down gently on a spot the scientist indicated, Dr. Essen immediately became busy with her patient. Presently she looked up and nodded reassuringly.

"There's time," she said.

But De Kalb waved his arm, sending light sliding erratically up the rock, and said, "Time -- there is time here! This space and this air form one immutable axis upon which all the past and the future turn like a wheel."

It was bombastic but it was impressive too. Dr. Essen and I were silent, trying to grasp that imponderable concept, trying perhaps to catch the sound of that vast turning. But De Kalb had moved into action.

"Now," he said, kneeling beside the black suitcase Dr. Essen had set down. "Now you shall see. Murray is all right for a while? Then -- " He snapped open the case and laid down its four sides so that the compact instruments within stood up alone, light catching in their steel surfaces.

He squatted down and began to unpack them, to set up from among part of the shining things a curious little structure like a tree of glass and blinking lights, fitting tiny jointed rods together, screwing bulbs like infinitesimal soap-bubbles into invisible sockets.

"Now, Letta," he said presently, squinting up at her in the dusty flash-beams, "your turn."

"Ira -- " She hesitated, shrugged uneasily. "Very well."

I held the light for them while they worked.

After what seemed a long while De Kalb grunted and sat back on his heels. There was a thin, very high singing noise and the tiny tree began to move. I let my flashlight sink upon my knee. De Kalb reached over and switched it off. Dr. Essen's beam blinked out with a soft click. It was dark except for the slowly quickening spin of the tree, the flicker of its infinitesimal lights.

Very gradually it seemed to me that a gray brightness was beginning to dawn around us, almost as if the whirling tree threw off light that was tangible and accumulated in the dusty air, hanging there upon every mote of dust, spinning a web that grew and grew.

It was gathering in an egg-shaped oval that nearly filled the chamber.

By the gray luminous dimness I could see Dr. Essen with her hands on a flat thick sheet of metal which she held across her knees. There were raised bars of wire across its upper surface and she seemed almost to be playing it like a musical instrument as her fingers moved over the bars. There was no sound but the light slowly, very slowly, broadened around us.

"In theory," Dr. Essen said, "this would have worked years ago. But in practice, only this very special type of space provides the conditions we need. I published some papers in Forty-one on special atomic structures and the maintenance of artificial matrix. But the displacement due to temporal movement made practical application impossible. Only at the time-axis would that displacement theory became invalid.

"I am creating a rigid framework of matter now. Call it a matrix, except that the vibratory period is automatically adaptive, so that it's self-perpetuating and can't be harmed. Really, the practical application would be something like this -- if you were driving a car and saw another car -- about to collide with you, your own vehicle could automatically adjust its structure and become intangible. So -- "

"It isn't necessary for Mr. Cortland to understand this," De Kalb said, his voice suddenly almost gay. "Eager seeker after truth though he may be. There is still much I don't understand. We go into terra incognita -- but I think we will come to the Face in the end.

"Somehow, against apparent logic, we have managed to follow the rules of the game. Somehow events have arranged themselves -- in an unlikely fashion -- so that all four of us are entering the time axis where all four of us lie asleep -- intangible, impalpable and invisible except under ultraviolet.

"Murray may die. But since the nekronic creature attacked through time, as I believe, then perhaps sympathetic medicine may cure the Colonel. Some poisons kill but cure in larger doses. I don't know. Perhaps the long catalepsy outside time will enable Murray's wound to heal -- wherever it is. I suspect that the people of the Face may have foreseen all this. Are you getting drowsy, Mr. Cortland?"

I was. The softly whirling tree, the sweet, thin, monotonous sound of its turning were very effective hypnotics though I hadn't realized it fully till now. I made a sudden convulsive effort to rise. On the very verge of the plunge I realized that my decision had been made for me.

I felt my nerve going. I didn't want to embark on this crazy endeavor at all. A suicide must know this last instant of violent revulsion the moment after he has pulled the trigger or swallowed the poison. I put out every ounce of energy I had -- and moved with infinite sluggishness, perhaps a quarter of an inch from where I sat.

De Kalb's voice said, "No, no. The matrix has formed." My head was ringing.

The gray light was like a web that sealed my eyes. Through it, dimly, remotedly, far off in space and time, I thought I could see motion stirring that was not our motion -- and perhaps was --

And perhaps was ourselves, at the other end of the closing temporal circle, rising from sleep after adventures a million years in the future, a million years in the past. But that motion was wholly theirs. I could not stir.

Sealed in sleep, sealed in time, I felt my consciousness sinking down like a candleflame, like a sinking fountain, down and down to the levels below awareness.

The next thing I saw, I told myself out of that infinite drowsiness, would be the Face of Ea looking out over the red twilight of the world's end. And then the flame went out, the fountain sank back upon the dark wellspring of its origin far below the surfaces of the mind.

"And now we wait," De Kalb's voice said, ghostly, infinities away. "Now we wait -- a million years."

---

There was a rhythmic ebb and flow of waves on some murmurous shore. It must, I thought, be part of my dream.

Dream?

I couldn't remember. The murmur was a voice, but the things it said seemed to slip by over the surface of my mind without waking any ripples of comprehension. Sight? I could see nothing. There was movement somewhere, but meaningless movement. Feeling? Perhaps a mild warmth, no more. Only the voice, very low -- unless, after all, it were some musical instrument.

But it spoke in English.

Had I been capable of surprise that should have surprised me. But I was not. I was utterly passive. I let sensations come and go in the darkness that lay just beyond me, on the other side of that wall of the silenced senses. What world? What time? What people? It didn't matter yet.

" -- of waiting here so long," the voice said on a minor chord of sadness so intensely sweet that my throat seemed to tighten in response. Then it changed. It pleased -- and I knew even in my stupor that no one of flesh and blood could possibly deny whatever that strange sweet voice demanded. "So I may go now, Lord? Oh, please, please let me go!" The English was curious, at once archaic and evolved. "An hour's refreshment in the Swan Garden," the plaintive voice urged, "and I shan't droop so." Then a sigh, musical with a deliberate lilt.

"My hair -- look at it, Lord! The sparkles all gone, all gone. Poor sparkles! But only an hour in the Swan Gardens and I'll serve you again. May I go, Lord? May I go?"

No one could have denied her. I lay there enthralled by the sheer music of that voice. It was like the shock of icy water in the face to hear a man's brisk voice reply.

"Save your tongue, save your tongue. And don't flatter me with the name of Lord. This is business."

"But so many hours already -- I'll die, I know I'll die! You can't be so cruel -- and I'll call you Lord anyhow. Why not? You are my Lord now, since you have the power to let me live or -- " Heart-rending sorrow breathed in the sigh she gave.

"My poor hair," she said. "The stars are quite gone out of it now. Oh, how hideous I am! The sight of me when he wakes will be too dreadful, Lord! Let me take one little hour in the Swan Garden and -- "

"Be quiet. I want to think."

There was silence for a moment or two. Then the sweet voice murmured something in a totally unfamiliar language, sullenly. The man said, "You know the rules, don't you?"

"Yes, Lord. I'm sorry."

"No more impudence, then. I know impudence, even when I can't understand it. Pay attention to me now. I'm going to put an end to this session. When this man wakes bring him -- "

"To the Swan Garden? Oh, Lord Paynter, now? I will love you forever!"

"It isn't necessary," the crisp voice said, "Just bring him to the right station. The City's the nearest connection since this is confidential so far. Do you understand?"

"The City? Walk through the City? I'll die before I've gone a dozen steps. My poor slippers -- oh, Lord Paynter, why not direct transmission?"

"You'll have new slippers if you need them. I don't want to remind you again all this is secret work. We don't want anybody tuning in accidentally on our wave-length. The transmitter in the City has the right wave-band, so you can bring him -- "

His voice trailed off. The girl's tones interrupted, dying away in the distance in a faint, infinitely pitiable murmuring quaver. There was a pause, then the sound of light feet returning on some hard surface and a rush of laughter like a spurt of bright fountaining water.

"Old fool," she said, and laughed again. "If you think I care -- " The words changed and were again incomprehensible, in some language I had never heard even approximated before.

Then movement came, and light -- a brief, racking vertigo wrenched my brain around,

I opened my eyes and looked up into the face of the girl, and logic was perfectly useless after that. Later I understood why, knew what she was and why men's hearts moved at the sight and sound of her. But then it was enough to see that flawless face, the lovely curve of her lips, the eyes that shifted from one hue to another, the hyacinth hair where the last stars pulsed and died.

She was bending over me, the tips of her scented ringlets brushing my shoulder. Her voice was inhumanly sweet, and so soft with warmth and reassurance that all my bewilderment melted away. It didn't matter where I was or what had happened, so long as that lovely voice and that lovely face were near -- which was exactly the effect she had meant to make and exactly the reason why she was there. I knew her face.

At that moment I was not even trying to reason things out. My tongue felt thick and my mind was lightly furred all over with the effects of what? Sleep? Some drug they might have given me while I lay there helpless? I didn't know. I accepted all that was happening with a mindless acquiescence. Later I would wonder. Now I only stared up at the lovely, familiar face and listened to the lovely, familiar face and listened to the lovely, remotely familiar voice.

"You're all right now," she was murmuring, her changing eyes on mine. "Quite all right. Don't be worried. Do you feel strong enough yet to sit up? I have something I want you to see."

I got an elbow under me and levered myself slowly up, the girl helping. I looked around.

I was dressed in unfamiliar dark garments and I was sitting on a low couch apparently composed of a solid block of some hard yet resilient substance. We were alone together in a smallish room whose walls looked like the couch, hard yet faintly translucent, just a little yielding to the touch. Everything had the same color, a soft graylike mist or -- I thought dimly -- sleep itself, the color of sleep.

The girl was the color of -- sunlight, perhaps. Her smooth skin had an apricot glow and her gown was of thin, thin silky stuff, pale yellow, like layers of veiling that floated when she moved. There were still a few fading sparkles in her curls. Her eyes just now were a clear bright blue that darkened as I met them to something close to violet.

"Look," she said. "Over there, behind you, on the wall."

I turned on the couch and looked. The far wall had a circular opening in it. Beyond the opening I could see rough rock walls, a grayish glow of light, four figures lying motionless on the dusty floor. For a moment it meant nothing to me. My mind was still dim with sleep. Then --

"The cave!" I said suddenly. And of course, it was. That little glittering tree which was the last thing I had seen before sleep overtook me stood there, motionless now. Beside it lay De Kalb.

Dr. Essen slumbered beyond him, the flat metal sheet with the bars of wire still leaning against her knee. She lay on her side, the tired, gentle face half hidden by her bent arm, the gray curls on the dusty floor. There was a rather unexpected gracefulness to her angular body as she lay there, utterly relaxed in a sleep that was already -- how many thousands of years long?

My eyes lingered for an instant on her face, moved on to Murray's motionless body, moved back again to search the woman's half-hidden features for a disturbing something I could not quite identify. It was -- it was --

The figure beyond Murray's caught my attention suddenly and for an instant my mind went blank with amazement. The puzzle of Dr. Essen's face vanished in this larger surprise, the incredible identity of that fourth person asleep in the dusty cave. I gaped, speechless and without thought.

Up to that instant I suppose I had been assuming simply that all of us were being awakened, slowly and with difficulty, and that I had awakened first. But the fourth person asleep on the cavern floor was Jeremy Cortland. Jerry Cortland -- me.

I got to my feet unsteadily, finding after a moment or two that I was in fairly good control of all my faculties. The girl twittered in concern.

"I'm all right," I said. "But I'm still there!"

Then I paused. "That means the others may have wakened too. De Kalb -- Dr. Essen -- have they -- ?"

She hesitated. "Only you are awake," she said at last.

I walked on slightly uncertain feet across the floor and peered into the cave. There was no cave.

I knew it when I was close to the wall. I could see the light reflected slightly on the texture of the surface. The cave was only another reflection, television perhaps, or something more obscure, but with startlingly convincing depth and clarity.

And if that scene was separated from me in space it might be distant in time as well -- I might be seeing a picture of something hours or weeks old. It was an unpleasant moment, that. So long as I thought myself near to that last familiar link with my own world I had maintained a certain confidence that broke abruptly now. I looked around a little wildly at the girl.

"I'm not in that cave now -- they're not there now either, are they? This was just a picture that was taken before any of us woke. Did you wake first, then?" It was no good. I knew that. I rubbed my hand across my face and said, "Sorry. What did happen?"

---

She smiled dazzlingly. And for one flash of an instant I knew who she was. I knew why my eyes had been drawn back in puzzled surprise to Letta Essen lying with curious unexpected grace on the cavern floor.

I met this girl's shining gaze and for that one instant knew I was looking straight into the keen gray eyes of Letta Essen.

The moment of certainty passed in a flash. The girl's eyes shifted from gray to luminous blue, the long lashes fell and the unmistakable identity of a woman I knew vanished. But the likeness remained. The familiarity remained. This girl was Letta Essen.

My mind, groping for similes, seized at first on the theory that in some fantastic way Dr. Essen herself stood here before me masked by some science of beauty beyond the sciences I knew, in a shell of youth and loveliness through which only her keen gaze showed.

It was all a trick, I thought -- this is Letta Essen who did wake before me, somehow leaving her simulacrum there in the cave, as I had. This is Letta Essen in some amazingly lovely disguise for purposes of her own and she'll speak in a moment and confess. But it couldn't have been a disguise. This soft young loveliness was no mask. It was the girl herself. And her features were the features Letta Essen might have had twenty years ago if she had lived a wholly different life, a life as dedicated to beauty as Dr. Essen's had been to science.

Then I caught a bewildering gray flash again and I knew it was Letta Essen -- no disguise, no variation on the features such as kinship or remote descent might account for. The mind is individual and unique. There are no duplications of the personality. I knew I was looking into the eyes of Letta Essen herself, no matter how impossible it seemed.

"Dr. Essen?" I said softly. "Dr. Essen?"

She laughed. "You're still dreaming," she said. "Do you feel better now? Lord Paynter -- the old fool -- is waiting for us. We should hurry."

I only gaped at her. What could I say? If she wasn't ready to explain how could I force her to speak? And yet I knew.

"I'm here to welcome you, of course," she said lightly, speaking exactly as if I were some stranger to whom she must be polite, but who was of no real interest to her. "I was trained for work like this -- to make people feel at ease. All this is a great mystery but -- well, Lord Paynter will have to explain. I'm only an entertainer. But a very good one. Oh, very good.

"Lord Paynter sent for me when he knew you would awaken. He thought his own ugly face might put you into such a mood you'd never answer any questions." She giggled. "At least, I hope he thought so." She paused, regarding me with exactly the cool keen speculative stare I had so often met when the woman before me was Letta Essen. Then she shrugged.

"He'll tell you as much as you ought to know, I suppose. It's all much too mystifying for me." Her glance shifted to the cavern where the sleepers lay motionless and I thought there was bewilderment in her eyes as she looked uneasily from face to sleeping face. Again she shrugged.

"Well, we should go. If we're late Lord Paynter will have me beaten." She seemed very unconcerned about the prospect. "And please don't ask questions," she added, "for I'm not allowed to answer. Even if I knew the answers. Even if I cared."

I was watching her with such urgent attention that my eyes ached with the effort of trying to be more than eyes, trying to pierce through her unconcern and see into the depths of the mind which I was certain was Letta Essen's. She smiled carelessly at me and turned away.

"Come along," she said.

There was nothing for me to do but obey. Clearly I was expected to play the same game her actions indicated. With some irony I said, "You can tell me your name, can't you?"

"I am Topaz -- this week," she said. "Next week, perhaps -- something else. But you may think of me until then as Topaz."

"Thanks," I said dryly. "And what year are you Topaz in? What country? Where am I, anyhow?"

"The Lord Paynter will tell you that. I don't care to be beaten."

"But you speak English. I can't be very far from home."

"Oh, everyone who matters knows English. It's the court language of the Mother Planet, you see. The whole galaxy operates on an English basic. There has to be some common language. I -- oh dear, I will be beaten! Come along."

She turned away, tugging me by the arm. There was a button on the opposite wall and the way she walked beside me toward it, the way she reached to touch the button, followed so definite a pattern of graceful motion that it seemed like dancing.

In the wall a shutter widened. Topaz turned. "This is the City," she told me.

I had seen the beginnings of such places in my own time. In the second level under Chicago, by the canal -- at Hoover Dam -- in the great bridges and the subways of Manhattan. Those had been the rudiments, ugly, crude, harsh. This was a city of machines, a city of metal with blood of invisible energy.

Ugly? No. But frightening -- yes.

Topaz led me across a strip of pavement to a cushioned car like a big cup and we sat down in it and the car started, whether or not on wheels I can't say. It moved in three dimensions, rising sharply in the air sometimes to avoid collisions, to thread its intricate pattern through that singing city.

The sound was, perhaps, the strangest part. I kept watching and listening with the automatic attention of the reporter, senselessly making mental notes for articles I would never write. A single note hummed through the city, clear and loud as a trumpet, sliding up and down the scale. Not music, for there was no pattern, but much like a clarinet, varied every changing second.

I asked Topaz about it. She gave me a glance from Letta.

Essen's eyes and said, "Oh, that's to make the noise bearable. You can't get rid of the noise, you know, without sacrificing the effect but you can transform it into harmonious sound that does convey the proper things. There's -- what do you call it -- frequency modulation. I think that's it.

"All the noises of the City every second add up to one key vibration, a non-harmonic, and that's simply augmented by a machine so the audible result isn't so unpleasant. The only alternative would be to blanket it completely and that would mean sacrificing a good part of the total effect, you know."

"I don't know," I said. "What do you mean, effect?"

She turned in the car to look at me. Suddenly she dimpled.

"No, I see you don't understand. Well, I won't explain. I'll save it for a surprise."

I didn't argue with her. I was too busy staring around me at the City. I can't describe it. I won't try and I don't need to. You've read about such places, maybe pictured them for yourself. Precision, perfect functionalism, all one mighty machine made up of machines.

There were no humans, no life, except for us under the dome of steel sky. The light was gray, clear, oddly compact, and through that steel-colored air the city trumpeted its wailing cry of a world that was not my world, a time that was yet to come.

Where was the red twilight of the world's end? Where was the Face of Ea, from which the call for help had come.

Or did that world lie somewhere just outside the city? Something had gone strangely wrong in the time-axis -- that much was certain. If I let myself think about it I'd probably start gibbering. Things had been taken out of my control and all I could do was ride along.

We drew up before a towering steel and plastic building. Topaz jumped briskly out of the car, took my hand confidently and led me into the low door before us. We had stepped straight into an elevator apparently, for a panel sighed shut behind us and I felt the familiar pressure underfoot and the displaced air that means a rapid rising up a shaft.

The panel opened. We stepped out into a small room similar to the one in which I had awakened.

"Now," Topaz said with relief. "We're here. You were very good and didn't ask too many questions, so before we go I'll show you something."

She touched another button in the wall, and a plate of metal slid downward out of sight. There was thick glass behind it. Topaz fingered the button again and the glass slid down in turn. A gust of sweet-smelling air blew in upon us. I caught my breath and leaned forward to stare.

We were very high up in the city but we were looking out over a blossoming countryside, bright in the season of late spring. I saw meadows deep in grass and yellow flowers, far below. Streams winked in the bright, clear sunlight, here and there fruit-trees were in blossom. Bird-song rose and fell in the sunshine.

"This of course," Topaz said, "is the world we live in. There's only one museum."

"Museum?" I echoed almost absently, "What museum?"

"The City. There's only one. All machines and robots. Isn't it horrible? They built like that, you know, back in barbarous times. We keep it in operation to show what it was like. That's why they can't blanket the noises altogether, it would spoil the effect. But no one lives here. Only students come sometimes. Our world is out there."

"But where do people live?" I asked. "Not in -- well, villages, communities?"

"Oh no. Not any more. Not since the dark ages. We have transmission now, you see, so we don't need to live huddled up together."

"Transmission?"

"This is a transmitter." She waved at the room behind us. "That other place, where you woke, was a receiver."

"Receiver of what? Transmitter of what?" I felt like Alice talking to the Caterpillar,

"Of matter, naturally. Much easier than walking." She pressed the stud again and the glass and metal slid up to shut out that glowing springtime world. "Now," she said, "We'll go -- wherever it is we're going. I don't know. Lord Paynter -- "

"I know -- the old fool."

Topaz giggled. "Lord Paynter's orders are already on record. In a moment we'll see." She did domething with the buttons on the wall. "Here we go," she said.

Vertigo spun through my mind. The wailing of that ancient, wonderful, monstrous City died away.

---

It was a little like going down fast in an elevator. I didn't lose consciousness but the physical sensations of transmission were so bewildering and so disorienting that I might as well have been unconscious for all the details I could give -- then or later -- about what happens between transmitter and receiver. All I know is that for a while the walls shimmered around me and gravity seemed to let go abruptly inside my body, so that I was briefly very dizzy.

Then, without any perceptible spatial change at all, the walls suddenly steadied and were not translucent pale gray any more, but hard dull steel, with the rivets showing where plates overlapped and here and there a streak of rust. I was in a somewhat smaller room than before. And I was alone.

"Topaz?" I said tentatively, looking around for her. "Topaz?" And then, more loudly, "Dr. Essen -- where are you?"

No answer, except for the echo of my voice from those dull rusty walls.

This time it was harder to take, I don't know why. Maybe things like that are cumulative. It was the second time I'd taken a jump into the unknown, piloted by somebody who was supposed to know the angles, and come out at the far end alone and in the wrong place.

I looked at the walls and fought down sheer panic at the possibility that this time I had really gone astray in the time-dimension and wakened here in the same room from which I'd set out in the City museum, a room now so aged that the wall surfaces had worn away and the exposed steel corroded and only I remained alive and imprisoned in a dead world.

It was a bad moment.

I had to do something to disprove the idea. Obviously the one possible action was to get out of there. I took a long step toward the nearest wall --

And found myself staggering. Gravity had gone wrong again. I weighed too much. My knees were trying to buckle, as if the one step had put nearly double my weight upon them. I braced my legs and made it to the wall in wide, plodding steps, compensating in every muscle for that extraordinary downward pull.

The moment my hand touched the wall there was a noise of badly oiled hinges and a door slid back in the steel.

Now let me get this straight.

Everything that happened happened extremely fast. It was only later that I realized it, because I had no sense of being hurried. But in the next thirty seconds the most important thing that was to occur in that world, so far as I was concerned, took place with great speed and precision.

Through the opening came a cool dusty light and the sound of buzzing, soft and insistent. I guessed at anything and everything.

I stood on the threshold of an enormous room. It was braced, tremendously braced, with rusted and pitted girders so heavy they made me think of Karnak and the tremendous architecture of the Egyptians. In an intricate series of webs and meshes metal girders ran through the great room, catwalks, but perhaps not for human beings, since some were level while others tilted dizzily and on a few one would have had to walk upside-down. I noticed, though, that while most of the catwalks were rusted those on which a man could walk without slipping off were scuffed shiny.

There was a series of broad high windows all around the room. Through them I could see a city.

Topaz had said there were no cities in her civilization except for the Museum. Well, perhaps there weren't. Perhaps I had plunged unknowingly into time again, and looked upon a city like that Museum, no longer preserved in dead perfection. This city was living and very old. An obsolete metropolis, perhaps a nekropolis in the sense De Kalb had used the term. Everywhere was decay, rust, broken buildings, dim lights.

The sky was black. But it was day outside, a strange, pallid day lit by bands of thin light that lay like a borealis across the dark heavens. Far off, bright but not blinding, a double sun turned in the blackness.

But there were people on the streets. My confidence came back a little at the sight of them, until I realized that something curious was taking place all through the city as I watched a strange, phantom-like flitting of figures -- men flashing into sight and out again like apparitions in folklore. I stared, bewildered, for an instant, before I realized the answer.

Perhaps in a city of the future like this one I had expected vehicles or moving ways of endless belts. Now I saw that at intervals along the street were discs of dull metal set in the pavement. A man would step on one -- and vanish. Another man would suddenly appear on another, step off and hurry toward a third disc.

It was matter-transmission, applied to the thoroughly practical use of quick transportation.

I saw other things in that one quick look about the city. I won't detail them. The fact of the city itself is all that was important about that phase of my thirty seconds' experience there.

There were two other important things. One was the activity going on in the enormous room itself. And the third was waiting almost at my elbow. But I'm taking these in the reverse order of their urgency.

Something was happening on the far side of the room. It wasn't easy to see, because of the distance and because a number of men in dark close-fitting garments clustered around it. I thought it might be an autopsy.

There was a table as high as an operating table and a man or a body lay stretched out on it. Above the table hung a web of thin, shining, tenuous matter that might have been lights or wires. It made me think, for no clear reason, of a complex chart of the neural system.

At the lower edge the bright lines appeared to connect with the object on the table. At the top they vanished into a maze of ceiling connections I couldn't follow. Some of the wires, or lights, were brilliantly colored, others were silvery. Light and color flowed along them, coalesced at intersections, glowed dazzlingly and flowed on along diverse channels downward.

That was the thing of secondary impo