第87章

In the Lair of the DwellerIT IS WITH marked hesitation that I begin this chapter, be-cause in it I must deal with an experience so contrary to every known law of physics as to seem impossible.Until this time, barring, of course, the mystery of the Dweller, Ihad encountered nothing that was not susceptible of natural-istic explanation; nothing, in a word, outside the domain of science itself; nothing that I would have felt hesitancy in reciting to my colleagues of the International Association of Science.Amazing, unfamiliar--ADVANCED--as many of the phenomena were, still they lay well within the limits of what we have mapped as the possible; in regions, it is true, still virgin to the mind of man, but toward which that mind is steadily advancing.

But this--well, I confess that I have a theory that is nat-uralistic; but so abstruse, so difficult to make clear within the short confines of the space I have to give it, so dependent upon conceptions that even the highest-trained scientific brains find difficult to grasp, that I despair.

I can only say that the thing occurred; that it took place in precisely the manner I am about to narrate, and that Iexperienced it.

Yet, in justice to myself, I must open up some paths of preliminary approach toward the heart of the perplexity.

And the first path is the realization that our world WHATEVERit is, is certainly NOT the world as we see it! Regarding this Ishall refer to a discourse upon "Gravitation and the Principle of Relativity," by the distinguished English physicist, Dr.A.

S.Eddington, which I had the pleasure of hearing him de-liver before the Royal Institution.1

*1 Reprinted in full in _Nature_, in which those sufficiently interested may peruse it.--W.T.G.

I realize, of course, that it is not true logic to argue--"The world is not as we think it is--therefore everything we think impossible is possible in it." Even if it BE different, it is governed by LAW.The truly impossible is that which is out-side law, and as nothing CAN be outside law, the impossible CANNOT exist.

The crux of the matter then becomes our determination whether what we think is impossible may or may not be possible under laws still beyond our knowledge.

I hope that you will pardon me for this somewhat aca-demic digression, but I felt it was necessary, and it has, at least, put me more at ease.And now to resume.

We had watched, Larry and I, the frog-men throw the bodies of Yolara's assassins into the crimson waters.As vul-tures swoop down upon the dying, there came sailing swiftly to where the dead men floated, dozens of the luminous globes.Their slender, varicoloured tentacles whipped out;the giant iridescent bubbles CLIMBED over the cadavers.And as they touched them there was the swift dissolution, the melting away into putrescence of flesh and bone that I had witnessed when the dart touched fruit that time I had saved Rador--and upon this the Medusae gorged; pulsing lam-bently; their wondrous colours shifting, changing, glowing stronger; elfin moons now indeed, but satellites whose glim-mering beauty was fed by death; alembics of enchantment whose glorious hues were sucked from horror.

Sick, I turned away--O'Keefe as pale as I; passed back into the corridor that had opened on the ledge from which we had watched; met Lakla hurrying toward us.Before she could speak there throbbed faintly about us a vast sighing.

It grew into a murmur, a whispering, shook us--then pass-ing like a presence, died away in far distance.

"The Portal has opened," said the handmaiden.A fainter sighing, like an echo of the other, mourned about us."Yolara is gone," she said, "the Portal is closed.Now must we hasten --for the Three have commanded that you, Goodwin, and Larry and I tread that strange road of which I have spoken, and which Olaf may not take lest his heart break--and we must return ere he and Rador cross the bridge."Her hand sought Larry's.

"Come!" said Lakla, and we walked on; down and down through hall after hall, flight upon flight of stairways.Deep, deep indeed, we must be beneath the domed castle--Lakla paused before a curved, smooth breast of the crimson stone rounding gently into the passage.She pressed its side; it revolved; we entered; it closed behind us.

The room, the--hollow--in which we stood was faceted like a diamond; and like a cut brilliant its sides glistened--though dully.Its shape was a deep oval, and our path dropped down to a circular polished base, roughly two yards in diameter.Glancing behind me I saw that in the closing of the entrance there had been left no trace of it save the steps that led from where that entrance had been--and as I looked these steps TURNED, leaving us isolated upon the circle, only the faceted walls about us--and in each of the gleaming faces the three of us reflected--dimly.It was as though we were within a diamond egg whose graven angles bad been turned INWARD.

But the oval was not perfect; at my right a screen cut it--a screen that gleamed with fugitive, fleeting luminescences --stretching from the side of our standing place up to the tip of the chamber; slightly convex and crisscrossed by mil-lions of fine lines like those upon a spectroscopic plate, but with this difference--that within each line I sensed the pres-ence of multitudes of finer lines, dwindling into infinitude, ultramicroscopic, traced by some instrument compared to whose delicacy our finest tool would be as a crowbar to the needle of a micrometer.

A foot or two from it stood something like the standee of a compass, bearing, like it a cradled dial under whose crystal ran concentric rings of prisoned, lambent vapours, faintly blue.From the edge of the dial jutted a little shelf of crystal, a keyboard, in which were cut eight small cups.

Within these cups the handmaiden placed her tapering fingers.She gazed down upon the disk; pressed a digit--and the screen behind us slipped noiselessly into another angle.