The Universe Maker (11 page)

It didn't seem to occur to Ann Reece to ask what had happened to him. She moved to a door and disappeared.

Cargill was served a thick steak, medium rare, a baked potato and for dessert a baked apple. He ate with a concentration and purpose that reminded him of his first meal aboard the Bouvy floater. Thought of Lela made him feel tense. And so, when he suddenly looked up and saw that Ann was sitting back, watching him with amusement, it irritated him. She had changed her dress while the meal was being prepared. The short skirt was gone and she wore a long blue gown that matched the color of her eyes. It also made her look much younger. She had a pert face on which she wore a faintly calculating expression. Her lips were firm and well-shaped, and she carried herself with an air of great assurance.

"What's all this about?" Cargill said. "What are you going to train me for?"

Her expression changed. A set look came into her eyes and her lips tightened. But her voice retained some of the humor of her earlier amusement. She said, "You're the key figure. Without you there's no war."

"I'm sure I'm thrilled," said Cargill acridly. "Does that make me a general?"

"Not exactly." She broke off, snapped: "We're sick of the horrible world the Shadows have created for us." Her voice had lost its lightness. It was hard with anger. She flared: "Imagine changing the past, so that people will gradually become more civilized, get over their neuroses, and all that nonsense. It's against reason, against—religion."

"Religion?" said Cargill, remembering his own speculations. "Do you believe in the soul?"

"God is within everyone," she said.

Cargill had heard that one before. "People keep saying that," he said, "but then they act as if they don't mean it.
Let's just assume for a moment that it's true."

"Of course it's true." She was impatient. "What do you mean, assume?"

"I mean," said Cargill, "let's assume it as a scientific fact."

She was silent. A wary expression came into her face. Cargill knew that look. He had seen it in the eyes of the chaplain of his company, and in the faces of other people whenever the subject of their belief was pressed too hard.

"Scientific?" she said, and she made it a term of opprobrium.

Cargill laughed. He couldn't help it. Her house was filled with "scientific" equipment. She had rescued him by the use of scientifically developed mechanisms that impressed even him, who came from a scientifically oriented world. But now he had applied the term to a forbidden area of thought.

He ceased his laughter with an effort, and said soberly: "I'm honestly beginning to believe that I'm the only person who really thinks the soul might exist. My picture of it is perhaps a little more wonderful than that of even those who give lip service to the word and to the idea behind it. At first, I thought it might be an energy field in space-time, but that doesn't quite take into account the vast age of the material universe. The way I've been moved around makes time curiously unimportant as a factor. It would be easy, on the basis of the-estimated age of the universe, to make all religions look ridiculous, but that isn't what I want to do. I'm guessing that all this smoke has a hot fire under it somewhere, but the understanding we've had so far is just a superficial glimpse at the underlying reality. What do you think of that?"

"I really don't care to discuss the matter, Mr. Cargill." She was cold. "Your childish speculations are not exactly an insult, since you do seem sincere; but they ignore a thousand years of religious thought."

"You mean," said Cargill, "ten thousand years of making the effort not to know, of belief enforced by just such an attitude—and never a good look at what might actually be there. Well, I'll take the look myself and I'll keep you in touch."

Ann Reece smiled grimly. "You won't have much time for private speculations. You'll be too busy helping us
change
our world."

Cargill studied her from under narrowed eyelids. The reminder that he was to be used in their plans abruptly enraged him. "This world of yours," he said, "does it include justice for individuals?"

Her lips were clenched into a thin line. "There's only one way to change the world," she said slowly. "We've got to get rid of the Shadows, and force the Planiacs out of the sky to a life of usefulness. Once that happens, it won't be long before this planet is humming again with industry and all that makes life worth living. Henceforth, justice will always include hard work."

Cargill glanced deliberately around the luxuriously furnished room. "For you, also?" he asked, softly.

She must have caught the implication, for she flushed.

She said, "Your idea that people who manage estates don't work at it is just not so."

It was true, of course, in an important sense. But he felt too basically hostile to her to be impressed by her vision. He said, "But where do I fit into this? What is the training that I'm to be given?"

Ann Reece relaxed. The amused look came back to her face. She said with heavy irony, "One times one times one times one times zero equals a million. That's the mathematics involved in your training. Anything else you want to know?"

"Damn you!" said Cargill. He was on his feet, leaning over the table toward her. "If you people expect any cooperation from me you'd better start telling me the facts. Whose idea was it to use me in whatever you plan to use me for in this Shadow City attack?"

"Grannis'."

That held him briefly. "How come," said Cargill finally, "that you're all playing the game of a Shadow traitor?"

Ann Reece was cool. "We're not playing his game. He's playing ours. He agrees with us. He thinks we have the answer to the problems of this age."

"You
fools
!" Cargill was scathing. "Why, you're just a bunch of babes in the wood—"

He stopped himself in alarm. Careful, he thought. This was no time to reveal his knowledge that Grannis was playing on several sides. Slowly he settled back into his chair. He stared at her unsmilingly. She said, "As soon as you've finished eating I'll show you to your bedroom. You sound tired." There was no doubt of the sarcasm in her voice.

After she had left him Cargill explored his bedroom. The walls were done in shades of green, contrasting very effectively with a vividly white bed and white furniture.

He was surprised when he looked out of the window, to see that the room was on the second floor. Since he had climbed no stairs he guessed that the house was built on the side of a hill. He mentally measured the distance to the ground below,
then
frowned with irritation. Twenty feet was a considerable drop even for a strong active man. Not that it mattered. He doubted that he'd get far if he tried to escape through the window. He realized his method of handling this situation must be on a much higher level of action.

He turned back into the room and started to undress. He was tired and he fell asleep almost immediately.

Even as he slept he became aware of a voice talking to him, urging him to action. It said something about Shadow City and the necessity of breaking down the Shadow pyramid. "Throw the switch," the voice commanded. "And the signal for you to act is—is—"

It faded away. The sound and its echoes retreated into an abyss of tune and space. He grew aware that Ann Reece and a man were in the room. The man said: "Does that complete it?"

"That completes it," said Ann Reece. The two of them went out.

Cargill waited for he knew not what. Whatever had happened didn't feel complete inside him. He had the strange sensation that something basic at the heart of his being had been disturbed. "It's because of the
thoughts I've had about reality," he decided. "Except for that—it would be complete."

A geometrical design drifted past his inner eye. It had black areas in it; and there must have been grief emotion, for he felt suddenly depressed. The interesting thing was that he knew what the design meant. It was a fold in the time continuum. Even as he watched it, tensely, it altered almost imperceptibly. Various lines, like threads of a fabric, seemed to fray, and he had the uneasy feeling that something was being strained almost to breaking. It remained poised in delicate and dangerous balance.

The picture in his mind's eye changed and became a scene. He seemed to be on a hill overlooking a lake that glittered at him with radioactive fluorescence. Except for the fiery blue lake, as far as he could see to every horizon was desolation. Without knowing where the knowledge came from, Cargill knew that the lake was a life-discard, dropped on the track of tune countless billions of years earlier.

What was more interesting about his awareness was the distinct conviction that the lake was an experiment which he had started personally, and abandoned. The lake, thus casually treated, clung to its "life," and had maintained itself for almost the full period of the existence of the material universe. At the moment, it was in communication with another life-discard on the planet of a remote star. The communication was a kind of regeneration process whereby each furnished the other with energy elements essential to survival. The intricate interrelationship had strong love characteristics.

Cargill watched the lake briefly, tuned in on the telepathy, and then—without effort—crossed, the void to where the other being existed. Here were craggy mountains, a
plantless
, treeless horizon of gray-brown
soil; and high on a mountain peak was a giant statue. The statue was a dead black in color and had no resemblance to a human shape. And yet, Cargill knew, it was a try at form, an attempt to achieve life on a higher level than the lake.

The idea of life that moved had not yet entered his thought. He himself did not move, as movement. There was no space, except what he imagined, and only the lake and the statue had time in them. It was a brilliant creative process, as he had originally conceived it. By imagining space, by having a high wave and low wave concept of space (thus setting up energy flows), by enforcing an energy slow-down to the point where it took on the appearance of matter, he deluded the lake and the statue into believing that they
were
something and
possessed
something. Thereafter, they fought desperately to sustain the illusion. It took up so much of their "energy" that they didn't have "time" to examine any other reality.

The scene began to fade. He had a tendency to hold onto it, but he realized the pictures were a chance contact with an ancient
memory,
and important only in that a rigidity in his present
beingness
had been overcome; it signified that for a moment he had been free. He guessed, without having any detail, that there would be millions of scenes like
that.
. . elsewhere.

He seemed to be back in the bed, and he was about to settle into a warm comfortable sleep when the realization dawned: He was not yet complete. The feeling of imbalance remained. He saw the geometric design again, and it looked less dangerous—the threads seemed not so frayed, the fabric appeared firmer. Except that it moved.

As he watched, it swayed and wavered as if it were being blindly, fumblingly probed.

His first fleeting awareness of something more concrete was of cool sheets and the clean, antiseptic smell of a hospital. He awakened as from a deep sleep, but with a total awareness of physical well-being that was startling. He lay motionless, with eyes closed, becoming aware of the unfamiliar sensation—a joy of being alive, he thought. He felt delighted that it could be so.

He knew without particularly thinking about it that this was not the bedroom in Ann Reece's home. All that seemed far away, though not so far as a few minutes before . . . with the lake. That had been truly remote. This was—he couldn't decide.

He was puzzling over the different feeling that this had, when a woman spoke. "How much longer?" she asked.

It was not the voice of Ann Reece; and that was—so it seemed at first—what made him keep his eyes shut.

Footsteps sounded on a carpeted floor, and then a pleasant baritone voice replied: "I'll call you when he wakes. After all, we took advantage of an opportunity here. Everything had to be spontaneously done without preliminary thought."

Her answer seemed pettish. "Shouldn't our control of time have made it possible for us to do this
better
?"

The man remained respectful but firm. "We don't have control beyond the second fold. The gap between our present era of 7301
a.d
.
and the twenty-fourth century is so vast that—"

She cut him off. "I am familiar with these arguments. Notify me the instant he recovers."

Cargill had the impression that she moved away, and he took the opportunity to cautiously slit one eyelid open. He closed it again immediately, but he had had a quick glimpse of a scantily arrayed woman pausing at a doorway and looking back. He had a dimmer impression that she had a cape thrown back over one shoulder.
 
Evidently, she had paused for an anti-climactic remark, for she spoke again:

"I feel uneasy about all this," she said, "as if everything is somehow out of our control."

"Madam, this will continue to be true for some time to come."

Cargill opened both his eyes slightly at that point, and cautiously kept them open. He saw that the woman was dressed in a bra that resembled what sometimes accompanied a bathing suit in the 1950's, and that her dark blue shorts gave a similar impression of belonging to the beach, or at least suggested that the climate was sub-tropical. She had an ankle-length cape of metallic gold net flung over her right shoulder. Her dark hair shimmered with a faint bluish light and framed a face with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. It was not a beautiful face but it was a distinctive, aristocratic one. It implied race pride, family pride, pride of position.

Even as he looked at the woman, Cargill saw out of the corner of one eye that a gray-haired man with a young face was watching him with a guarded look that indicated consternation. Cargill somehow got the idea that he should pretend unconsciousness until after the woman departed. He started to sigh with resignation but caught himself in time and quietly closed his eyes. The woman must have chosen that moment to leave the room, for when he peeped again, she was in the act of walking through the open door. She did not look back.