Su-Mueng turned to the controller he’d just treated so barbarically. “Come with me,” he said. “It’s imperative that I speak with the retort managers!”
“We’ve captured the ruling clique, sir.”
“All right, let me see them.”
Brourne stared at the impassive, droopy-moustached, silky-bearded, satined and silked old men who came up on the screen. “How do you know this is the ruling clique?” he demanded.
The youthful, enthusiastic Captain came back into view. “They admit it, sir. We’ve found a kind of computer that knows a few Earth phrases.”
“Oh? How many?”
“Not enough for a useful interrogation, I’m afraid.”
“I see. Well, lock them up until later.”
“Yes, sir.” The Captain snapped off a salute and went off the line.
Brourne turned away, gingerly massaging his injured arm, which lay in a sling. What was the point of capturing anybody when he couldn’t talk to them? He cursed again for having let Hueh Su-Mueng get away. At the time he’d thought nothing of it, hadn’t even ordered any pursuit or search. Why bother? The Chink’s first move had doubtless been to divest himself of his uniform, whereupon he might as well have been invisible. It was practically impossible to tell these Chinks apart.
There was another possibility, Brourne reminded himself. Leard Ascar was still in the city somewhere and sooner or later his men would find him. By all accounts Ascar was an intractable, unbalanced personality – in his preflight briefing Brourne had been advised that he was “unreliable” – but presumably he knew the language, as Heshke had. He would have to do.
The vidcom burred again. Brourne returned to it.
“HQ. Major Brourne.”
A serious-faced tech officer gazed out at him. “The sortie to the lower retort has sent back a report, sir.”
“Yes?”
“They say it’s deserted. Crammed full of factories and workshops – but there’s not a single human being there.”
“Deserted? You’re sure they’re not hiding out somewhere?”
“That’s not how things look, and no one’s been found yet.”
“So maybe that cur of a Chink was lying,” Brourne responded. “The whole place could be automated – no workers at all.”
“Perhaps – but again, that’s not how it looks. Right now there’s not a wheel turning. And there are signs of decay, as though the whole complex had been abandoned about fifty years ago.”
Brourne became thoughtful. “That doesn’t figure,” he rumbled. “It doesn’t figure at all. Wasn’t there supposed to be something about the two halves of the city not matching in time?”
“Our men simply went through a tunnel about a third of a mile long,” the tech said. “But there are other ways in. There’s a marshalling yard where the produce of the factories comes through. I’ll investigate further.”
“Do that. And keep me informed.”
Right now, he thought, is where Leard Ascar would really come in handy.
Ascar was trembling with excitement.
During the past few weeks Shiu Kung-Chien had told him a great deal about the Oblique Entity that had once nearly annihilated Retort City – as much, indeed, as the elder scientist himself knew. Ascar had begged that he, too, be allowed to visit this strange intelligence via the all-sense sender, but Shiu had prevailed upon him to delay the experience. The all-sense transmissions, crude at the moment, needed refining.
And so Ascar had worked patiently under the old man’s direction, studying and thinking deeply. The Oblique Entity, Shiu had intimated, had powers beyond the merely human. It wasn’t a biological intelligence; it wasn’t associated with any planet or celestial body; its nature, though it had a material structure, wasn’t readily intelligible to human beings.
During the last phase of their work to improve the transceiver the Titans had arrived and invaded the ISS. Shiu, imperturbable as ever (Ascar was impressed by the way any event, no matter how grave, failed to shake the placidity of the people here; they were, Shiu had told him once, dilettantes at everything, even living), had left Ascar to carry on, which he did while the noises of destruction as the Titans pulled down sections of the city to facilitate their easy movement grew nearer and nearer.
For the past half hour the sounds of conquest had died down. Presumably the Leisure Retort was now in the Titans’ grip, which meant that they’d soon be battering down his door. He was anxious to have made his trip before they did that, because they would very likely deprive him of any further opportunity and he was impelled by more than mere intellectual curiosity. Some time ago he’d asked Shiu Kung-Chien how the Oblique Entity’s own knowledge of the physical universe compared with their own.
Shiu Kung-Chien had hesitated. Compared with men, he’d said, the Oblique Entity had knowledge that was like that “of one of your ancient gods”.
Ascar had some very definite questions to put to this entity.
And so Ascar completed the countdown. Shiu had already completed a trial run with the new equipment; all Ascar had to do now was to make the final checks.
The flickering ideograms froze at last; the apparatus was poised in readiness. He rubbed his eyes. Although he’d been trained in a matter of minutes to read the specialised calligraphy Shiu used, he still found the ideograms hard to focus on at speed.
He glanced over the big, gleaming, block-like transformers of time energy that were dumped unceremoniously in the middle of the observatory, humming fuzzily. They had, he supposed, taken a couple of years to manufacture, yet they’d been delivered to Shiu within an hour of his submitting the designs. Such was the nature of the resources he could draw on: resources he used so carelessly, and in so cavalier a fashion, that Ascar was constantly amazed. He’d order new equipment with absolutely no thought for the labour time involved, drawing up version after version of some difficult design and demanding an operating model of each so as to try out his various (and sometimes offhand) ideas. His storeroom was jammed with machinery, much of it never used, and many items that arrived were sent back to be scrapped after a few desultory experiments.
The Oblique Entity was already reciprocating on their contact stream, expressing its willingness for the exchange. The cybernetic servitor moved into position to operate the equipment. His heart thumping, Ascar stepped into the transparent sphere. The hatch closed behind him as he sat down in the central chair, and then he was in darkness.
The transceiver seized his senses and snatched them out of intelligible time, hurling them in a direction no compass could ever find.
At first there was only silence, and continued darkness. Then out of that darkness a voice said suddenly: “I am here. You have arrived. What do you want?”
The voice, though loud, was smooth and confidential. It seemed to be spoken close to his ear – or rather, to both his ears. Behind the voice was a silence, but behind that silence Ascar fancied he could hear a whispering whistle, like the susurration that sometimes accompanied radio transmissions.
“I want to see you,” Ascar said into the darkness.
“How do you wish to see me?”
Ascar didn’t understand the question for a moment; then he answered: “I want to see you as you are.”
“Very well. Here is our physical reality.”
The change was brutally abrupt. Ascar suddenly found himself amid an uproar in a long gallery. He was kneeling, for the height of the gallery was only about four feet and gave approximately the same room on either side, though it stretched away ahead of him seemingly into infinity. Furthermore it was only one of a multitude of such structures arranged around him, and which he glimpsed through the iron frameworks separating them. And those frameworks contained —