The decision struck him with the force of a falling boulder: He was in infinity! And it was not an endless stretch of rock that surrounded him, but an unbounded expanse of — air!
Terrified, he backed toward the passage. For all beliefs had held that there were only two infinities — Paradise and Radiation.
Another step and he collided with Mogan.
The Zivver leader exclaimed, “I can’t even keep my eyes open! Where are we?”
“I—” Jared choked on his words. “I think we’re in Radiation.”
“Light! I smell it!”
“The smell of the monsters. But it’s not their scent at all — just the odor of this place.”
Dismayed, Jared retreated again toward the passageway. Then he became more aware of the intense heat and readily understood why the other’s zivving ability had been deafened. Mogan was used to the normal range of warmth in the worlds and corridors. Here, the heat of all the boiling springs in existence was pouring down from above.
And, abruptly, Jared knew he could not leave this infinity without definitely identifying it. Already he suspected which one it was. The heat was a more than sufficient clue. But he had to make certain. Bracing himself against the expected pain, he opened his eyes and let the tears out.
The uncanny impressions that assailed him were fuzzy this time and he wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand.
Then the composites came — sensations that he suspected were something like ziv impressions. He was uncannily aware — through the medium of his eyes themselves — that the ground sloped away in front of him toward a patch of tiny, slender things that swayed this way and that in the distance. Vaguely, he was reminded of manna trees. Only, their tops were lacy and delicate. And he remembered the Paradise plant legend.
But this was an infinity of heat, not at all suggestive of heavenly things.
Between the trees he zivved the details of small, geometrical forms, arranged in rows like the shacks in the Original World. Another supposed feature of Paradise.
But monsters dwelled here.
Suddenly he directed his attention to one paramount fact:
He was receiving detailed impressions of an infinite number of things at one time, without having to hear or smell them!
Which was a capability possible only in the oresence of the Great Light Almighty.
This, then, was it.
This was the end of his search.
He had found light. And Light was, after all, the stuff the monsters hurled ahead of themselves in the passageways.
But Light was not in Paradise.
It was in the infinity of Radiation with the Nuclear monsters.
All the legends, all the tenets were bitterly misleading.
For man there was no Paradise.
And, with the Atomic Demons roaming the passageways at will, humanity had reached the end of its material existence.
He threw his head back in desperation and full against his face crashed the deadliest silent sound imaginable.
It was an impression so fierce that it seemed to boil his eyes right out of their sockets.
Screaming at him in all its fury was a great, round, vicious thing that dominated Radiation with incredible force and heat and malignant majesty.
Hydrogen Himself!
Jared spun around and bolted for the passage, hardly aware that he had, at the same time, heard a noise on the incline before him.
Mogan shouted. But the anguished outcry was interrupted by a zip-hiss.
Jared made it back into the corridor, racing frantically after the echoes of his clickstones.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Hardly aware Mogan was no longer with him, Jared welcomed the intimate security of the Passageway’s walls as they closed in about him once more. The zip-hiss that had accounted for the Zivver leader’s absence was only an insignificant memory against his greater dismay.
Stumbling, he pushed on toward the first bend. His eyes, boiling and dripping tears of protest, were still feeling the awful presure of the monster stuff that had crammed all the empty space in that horrible infinity of Radiation.
He collided with a boulder, fell, picked himself up and raced on around the curve, only dimly aware that he was making his way among the hazards without the benefit of audible impulses.
Eventually he drew up and clung uncertainly to a slender hanging stone, waiting for his breathing to come under control.
Everything was clear now, ironically clear. All that stuff in infinity was — Light. It was the same Light he had spent a lifetime seeking. Only, it had turned out to be an evil thing because it was part of Radiation itself.
Then suddenly he felt the impact of yet another incredible realization:
Now he knew what Darkness was too!
It was here — in this very corridor — in all the corridors he had ever known, all the worlds he had ever visited. In his entire lifetime he had never been out of the Darkness, except for those few occasions on which he had encountered the monsters. There had been no way of recognizing it until he had first experienced Light.
But it was so simple now.
The infinity behind him was filled with Light. In the corridor ahead was a decided lessness of the stuff. And, around the next curve, there would be an absolute absence of Light, a totality of Darkness — so complete, so universal that he might have lived in it for ten thousand gestations without ever knowing it was there.
Reeling under the perplexing weight of strange, new concepts, he continued down the corridor, hands extended uncertainly. And, through the medium of his eyes alone, he could fully sense the Lightiessness that loomed ahead, stark as the most profound silence he had ever known — a heavy, thick curtain of Darkness.
With hesitant steps, he negotiated the bend and edged into the immaterial barrier, flinching as the Darkness closed inexorably in about him. Now, in feeling his way forward, his hands maintained a steady, probing motion. And, humiliated, he was reminded of how his less sensitive brother Romel had to grope his way into a dense silence.
With his next step his foot fell off into the emptiness of a shallow depression and he pitched forward clumsily. Before rising he gathered up a pair of pebbles and rattled them in his hand.
But now the clicks seemed remote and alien. Only with great concentration could he refine from the echoes the impressions of what lay ahead. And he wondered whether faulty hearing might be one of the immediate effects of Radiation sickness. Then he felt a fear as intense as the Darkness around him when he recalled another legend: Anyone who encountered Radiation could expect all kinds of severe illnesses — fever, deafness, fatal vomiting, shedding of the hair and blindness, whatever that was.
Yet, physical self-concern was buried under a bitterness that engulfed him like the stifling vapor of a boiling pit. Ahead stretched only a future as empty of material things as the vast infinity from which he had just escaped.
His every purpose was now nothing more than a shattered dream — his worlds decimated; Della gone; his search for Light ended in the agonizing remorse of disappointment and delusion. All his life he had chased a ringing hope down an intriguing corridor, only to overtake it finally and find that it was no more than a wisp of air.
Plodding on into the Darkness, he rattled his pebbles desperately, paying the price of severe attention for each impression he wrung from the no longer familiar echoes. In a frenzy, he wrested as much perceptive content as he could out of each reflected tone. And even then he had to pause occasionally and send a hand fumbling ahead to touch out an indistinct obstacle.
He reached the intersecting passage through which he and Mogan had arrived at this larger corridor and, a few steps farther, the reflections of his clicks began gathering impressions of the Original World’s resonant hollowness off to his left.