第88章

"Put your arm around my waist, Larry, darlin', and stand close," she murmured."You, Goodwin, place your arm over my shoulder."Wondering, I did as she bade; she pressed other fingers upon the shelf's indentations--three of the rings of vapour spun into intense light, raced around each other; from the screen behind us grew a radiance that held within itself all spectrums--not only those seen, but those UNSEEN by man's eyes.It waxed brilliant and ever more brilliant, all suffusing, passing through me as day streams through a window pane!

The enclosing facets burst into a blaze of coruscations, and in each sparkling panel I saw our images, shaken and torn like pennants in a whirlwind.I turned to look--was stopped by the handmaiden's swift command: "Turn not--on your life!"The radiance behind me grew; was a rushing tempest of light in which I was but the shadow of a shadow.I heard, but not with my ears--nay with MIND itself--a vast roaring; an ORDERED tumult of sound that came hurling from the outposts of space; approaching--rushing--hurricane out of the heart of the cosmos--closer, closer.It wrapped itself about us with unearthly mighty arms.

And brilliant, ever more brilliant, streamed the radiance through us.

The faceted walls dimmed; in front of me they melted, diaphanously, like a gelatinous wall in a blast of flame;through their vanishing, under the torrent of driving light, the unthinkable, impalpable tornado, I began to move, slowly --then ever more swiftly!

Still the roaring grew; the radiance streamed--ever faster we went.Cutting down through the length, the EXTENSIONof me, dropped a wall of rock, foreshortened, clenched close;I caught a glimpse of the elfin gardens; they whirled, con-tracted, into a thin--slice--of colour that was a part of me;another wall of rock shrinking into a thin wedge through which I flew, and that at once took its place within me like a card slipped beside those others!

Flashing around me, and from Lakla and O'Keefe, were nimbuses of flickering scarlet flames.And always the steady hurling forward--appallingly mechanical.

Another barrier of rock--a gleam of white waters incor-porating themselves into my--DRAWING OUT--even as were the flowered moss lands, the slicing, rocky walls--still another rampart of cliff, dwindling instantly into the vertical plane of those others.Our flight checked; we seemed to hover within, then to sway onward--slowly, cautiously.

A mist danced ahead of me--a mist that grew steadily thinner.We stopped, wavered--the mist cleared.

I looked out into translucent, green distances; shot with swift prismatic gleamings; waves and pulsings of luminosity like midday sun glow through green, tropic waters: dancing, scintillating veils of sparkling atoms that flew, hither and yon, through depths of nebulous splendour!

And Lakla and Larry and I were, I saw, like shadow shapes upon a smooth breast of stone twenty feet or more above the surface of this place--a surface spangled with tiny white blossoms gleaming wanly through creeping veils of phosphorescence like smoke of moon fire.We were shadows --and yet we had substance; we were incorporated with, a part of, the rock--and yet we were living flesh and blood; we stretched--nor will I qualify this--we STRETCHED through mile upon mile of space that weirdly enough gave at one and the same time an absolute certainty of immense horizon-tal lengths and a vertical concentration that contained noth-ing of length, nothing of space whatever; we stood THEREupon the face of the stone--and still we were HERE within the faceted oval before the screen of radiance!

"Steady!" It was Lakla's voice--and not beside me THERE, but at my ear close before the screen."Steady, Goodwin!

And--see!"

The sparkling haze cleared.Enormous reaches stretched before me.Shimmering up through them, and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure--fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion--grapes of Lethe--that cling to the tide-swept walls of the caverns of the Hebrides.

Through them, beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde--great as that with which Tamer-lane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs--men and women and children--clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked;slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, straight-browed Greeks, and Vikings centuries BEYONDtheir lives: scores of the black-haired Murians; white faces of our own Westerners--men and women and children --drifting, eddying--each stamped with that mingled horror and rapture, eyes filled with ecstasy and terror entwined, marked by God and devil in embrace--the seal of the Shin-ing One--the dead-alive; the lost ones!

The loot of the Dweller!

Soul-sick, I gazed.They lifted to us visages of dread; they swept down toward us, glaring upward--a bank against which other and still other waves of faces rolled, were checked, paused; until as far as I could see, like billows piled upon an ever-growing barrier, they stretched beneath us--staring--staring!

Now there was a movement--far, far away; a concentrat-ing of the lambency; the dead-alive swayed, oscillated, sep-arated--forming a long lane against whose outskirts they crowded with avid, hungry insistence.