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Quig stirred out of his own reveries. “How much more do you want to find out from him, Boyce?”

“Hah!” Ambrose hunched over the steering wheel and shook his head in despair. “At the moment all I’m doing is unlearning.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Well, I haven’t discussed this because we’ve had so many immediate practical problems to deal with, but the descriptions of Avernus that Gil has given me—even the pictures we got of the Avernian roof structure—have upset a lot of our ideas about the nature of matter. According to our physics the Avernian universe should be very weakly bound compared to the one we know. If I’d been asked to describe it a week ago, I’d have said it could exist only because antineutrinos have different masses, depending on their energy, and that all objects in that universe would consist of heavy particles surrounded by clouds of lighter particles.” Ambrose began to speak faster as he got into his subject.

“This indicates that their compounds wouldn’t be formed by electronic forces like .electro-valency or covalency. The weakness of the interactions would mean that all bodies in that universe—even the Avernian people themselves—would be a lot more…ah…statistical than we are.”

“Hey!” Quig began to sound excited. “You mean one Avernian should be able to walk right through another Avernian? Or through a wall?”

Ambrose nodded. “That was the old picture, but we’ve learned that it’s all wrong. Gil talked about stone buildings and islands and oceans…the rest of us saw those Earth-like roof beams…so it appears that an Avernian’s world is just as real and hard and solid to him as ours is to us. There’s one hell of a lot we have to learn, and Felleth seems to be the best source of information. Felleth teamed up with Gil, that is. That’s why I hate the idea of quitting this place.”

Snook, who had been listening to the conversation with growing bafflement, suddenly felt that the relationship between Ambrose’s world of nuclear theory and his own world of turbines and gearboxes was just as tenuous as that between Earth and Avernus. He had often been surprised at the sorts of things people needed to know in order to function in their jobs, but Ambrose’s field of expertise—in which people were treated as mobile clouds of atoms—was cold and inimical to him. Memories began to stir in his mind, half-recollections of something gleaned during his last encounter with Felleth.

He tapped Boyce on the shoulder. “Remember I told you Felleth said, “Particle, anti-particle—our relationship almost precisely defined”?”

“Yes?”

“I think something else has just come out of it.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Well, I don’t understand this, but I’ve got a kind of a picture of the phrase “particle, anti-particle” representing one edge of a cube, only the cube isn’t an ordinary cube. It seems to go off in a lot more directions…or maybe each edge of it is a cube in its own right. Does that make any kind of sense?”

“It sounds as though you’re wrestling with the concept of multi-dimensional space, Gil.”

“What’s the point of it?”

“I think,” Ambrose said gloomily, “Felleth knows that the relationship between our universe and his is only one of a whole spectrum of such relationships. There may be universe upon universe—and we haven’t got the right sort of mathematics to let us even begin thinking about them. Hell, I’ve got to stay in Barandi as long as I can.”

Snook’s thoughts reverted to the human aspects of the situation. “Okay, but if we’re going back to the mine in the morning, I think you should call the Press Association office and round up Gene Helig and force him to go with us. He’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a guarantee of safe conduct.”

Chapter Ten

They reached the mine head without incident, largely because Murphy had seen Carrier in the afternoon and obtained a special permit to bring a car inside the enclosure. Two jeeps were parked in the lee of the gatehouse, as usual, and they switched on their spotlights as Ambrose’s car swept by, but neither of them followed. Snook wondered if the crews had been tipped off about Gene Helig’s presence. In any case, he was glad Prudence had decided to remain at the hotel.

When he stepped out into the pre-dawn blackness he discovered he had become intensely aware of the stars. The constellations were glittering like cities in the sky, the colours of their individual stars easily distinguished, and Snook found himself grateful for their presence. He decided it was an unconscious reaction against his earlier vision of life on a blind planet, from which—even if the cloud cover were to vanish—it might not be possible to see the glowing stellar hearths of other civilisations. As he stood looking upwards, he vowed that when he got clear of Barandi he would take a positive interest in astronomy.

“There’s nothing to see up there, old boy,” Helig said jovially. “I’m told it’s all below ground these days.”

“That’s right.” Snook shivered in a river of cold air, shoved his hands deep into his jacket pockets and followed the rest of the group into descending cages. Ambrose had calculated that top dead centre for the Avernians would occur just above one of the worked-out pipes on Level Two. It was not an ideal location, because the Avernians would rise up into the rock ceiling for a few minutes, but the relative movement would be fairly slow, and there would be two good opportunities for what Ambrose, in a resurgence of good spirits, had described as an ‘inter-universal tete-a-tete.”

When he stepped on to the circular gallery of. Level Two, Snook was relieved to find that his apprehension of the previous day had faded. The first instant of union with Felleth had been shocking, but not so much for its strangeness but its effectiveness. He had entered a mind, an intelligence which was the product of an unknown continuum, and yet it had been less alien to him than the minds of many human beings , he had met. There had been in it. Snook believed, no capacity for murder or greed; and his certainty on this point made him marvel, yet again, that such a strange mode of communication should have been possible at all.

Ambrose had been emphatic in denying the possibility of previous long-range telepathic links between Avernians and humans—but, at the same time, Ambrose had confessed in the car that day that his knowledge of his specialist subject, nuclear physics, was faulty. He, Gilbert Snook, had suddenly become the world’s foremost expert on mind-to-mind data transfer—admittedly without intending to do so—and it satisfied his sense of the fitness of things to postulate that Avernians and human beings, living on concentric biospheres for millions of years, had telepathically influenced each other’s mental processes. The theory would account, perhaps, for the odd coincidence of words which Prudence had discovered, and for the widespread belief among primitive societies that another world existed below the surface of the Earth. Above all, and most important in Snook’s opinion, it accounted for the compatibility of thought modes which made communication possible in the first place.

As he walked around the gallery to the pipe where the other men had gathered, Snook wondered if he could play the role of scientific researcher and take his theory one experimental step further. Having made the initial mental contact with Felleth—could he now, by conscious effort, reach him over a distance? The range would not be all that great, because at that moment Felleth would be somewhere below him and rising up through the rock strata, but the principle could be proved. He stopped walking, took off his Amplites, closed his eyes and tried to screen his brain from all sensory inputs. Feeling selfconscious, and aware that he was probably guilty of monstrous clumsiness in Avernian terms, he strove to form a mental picture of Felleth and to project the Avernian’s name across the gulf which separated two universes.