He inspected the complex closely. As near as he could judge, the objects would best be described as machines. The galleries were, in fact, avenues for the siting of a continuous machine process which clattered, rotated and shuffled through indefinably intricate operations. Ascar was in the midst of a roaring, close-packed factory of vast extent, like some industrialised hell.
“Did you construct this?” he asked into thin air.
“No,” came the immediate answer, easily audible despite the deafening racket. “This is us – a small part of me. All this came into existence spontaneously, as a result of the process of time. I/We is not biological.”
Ascar felt himself moving forward. The floor offered no perceptible resistance to his knees, but a hot wind played against his face. The endless galleries swept past blurrily as he gathered speed and went darting into a claustrophobic infinity.
Then, without warning, he came to a stop. The machine complex was behind him in the form of a towering serried wall; its array, he recognised, was reminiscent of the array of atoms in a metal.
He faced now a huge gulf from whose depths came tumultuous boiling, a giving forth of steam clouds and acid vapours which seared his skin. Its size was impossible to judge. Ascar moved along the edge of this infernal pit until he came to another of its boundaries: a second wall of solid-packed quasi-machinery. But this time there were no narrow galleries through the honeycomb; the whole mass was impenetrable, none of its interstices being large enough to admit his body.
He glanced overhead, attracted by a regular, gigantic noise. Slanting obliquely over the space above him was something like a moving belt, or a high-speed printing press. It roared on its way at a colossal speed, for all that it must have been a hundred miles long.
“Perhaps you would prefer to meet me in different surroundings,” the Oblique Entity said. Everything vanished, and was replaced.
Ascar was sitting in a moderately sized room. The walls were of pale blue decorated with a white cornice. The light, coming from an unseen source, was very radiant, reminding him of sunlight. Before Ascar stood a table of polished walnut.
A door opened. In walked a young woman who sat down opposite him. Her skin was silver-blue. A slight smile was on her lips. Her eyes were bright blue, also, but they looked beyond, Ascar, as if they weren’t functional.
“Good day,” she said in a pleasant, full voice. “Is this more agreeable?”
Ascar took a moment to recover himself. “But this isn’t you as you really are, is it?” he said then.
“No, that is true.”
Ascar was vaguely disappointed. “Then it’s just an illusion you’re putting through the all-sense receiver. I didn’t come all this way looking for illusions.”
“Incorrect: it is no illusion. I have constructed the environment as a physical reality, into which I then projected your senses. Even the woman is a real living woman.”
Now Ascar was startled. “You can do that – in a moment?”
A pause. “Not in a moment, exactly. To produce the woman took a hundred years. Duration is of no consequence when time can be turned in a circle.”
So that was it, Ascar thought. It was the Production Retort all over again, but on an even larger scale. Here, the beginning and the end of a lengthy process could be bent around to occupy successive moments. He mulled over another point.
“Sometimes you call yourself I, and sometimes we,” he observed. “What are you, a single intelligence or a community?”
“I am neither individual nor plural,” the Oblique Entity replied. “Neither I nor we is adequate to describe my nature.”
“Then just what are you?”
The girl inclined her head, her eyes seeking a point beyond the wall, and a slight, quizzical frown crossed her features.
“Perhaps these surroundings, even, are disconcerting?” she suggested. “Let us try again.”
She rose, and pointed to a second door that opened itself behind Ascar. “Please continue on down the corridor,” she invited. “Another room has been prepared.”
After a last doubtful glance at the girl Ascar obeyed. At first the corridor was featureless, grey and doorless, stretching away to a bend, or dead-end, about two hundred yards ahead. But as he proceeded a peculiar illusion began to occur. Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed arcaded openings beyond which fish-like shapes flitted among green stalks and through wavering groves. Yet when he turned his head to look directly at this phenomenon his eye met only a blank wall.
He began to get the odd feeling that the elusive fish-shapes flitted, not externally, but through the recesses of his own mind. After a few tens of yards, however, the illusion ceased. But at the same time the character of the corridor began to change subtly, to become less featureless and more familiar. Suddenly Ascar stopped. He had come to a door: a door with the number 22 stencilled on it.
He looked around him. Just ahead was a T-junction, where arrowed notices pointed out departments in either direction. He looked again at the door with the number 22, recognising scratch marks and pimples in the paint.
This place was a corridor in the Sarn Establishment! Or a perfect replica thereof.
With thumping heart he opened the door. Within was a cosy, cabin-like room with a bunk, chairs, and a table strewn with abstracts and reports together with a large scratch-pad. The wall to his left was a bookcase holding a small library of specialised volumes.
It was his own room and refuge that he’d inhabited for five years.
Slowly he closed the door and sat down in his favourite chair, realising as he did so that the Oblique Entity must have extracted all these details from his own memory.
Above the door was a small speaker that had been used in the Sarn Establishment for paging. The Oblique Entity spoke now through this grill.
“To answer your question,” it said in its former male voice, “the type of consciousness I possess is neither an individual consciousness, nor is it a group consciousness or a community of individuals. In your language I could come closer to the facts simply by referring to ourselves as here, rather than to I or we. Henceforth, then I will give ourselves the personal pronoun here.”
Ascar pondered that, nodding. The Entity’s ploy, he decided, was working. He did feel more relaxed to be sitting here in his own room. It would have been easy to forget altogether that this was not, in fact, the Sarn Establishment.
“Since you can evidently read my mind, you already know what I mean to ask you,” he said. “Tell me, how much do you know of Earth?”
“Here know all about Earth,” the Oblique Entity replied.
“You mean you’ve read all about it in my mind?”
“No. Here knew about Earth already. By direct observation.”
“Then you know what’s about to happen there?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” said Ascar, giving his words emphasis and deliberation, “is there any way – any way at all – that the stream of time can be turned aside or stopped? Any way that collision can be avoided?”
The Oblique Entity didn’t answer immediately. Instead, a rich humming note issued from the speaker. All at once everything exploded around Ascar. He was floating in an inchoate void. Around him swam coloured shapes of every description, drifting in and out of his vision like sparks.
His body seemed to become elongated, like a streamer of smoke in a breeze; he was being stretched out to infinity. This process seemed to go on for a long, long time; and then, just as suddenly, he was back in his favourite chair in his comfortable room.