Jeff carefully slid his hand down the railing a few inches and tightened his grip. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet.
“You would land where the floor is very slippery,” Elaine said.
Mike made a tiny shrug. Laura turned and looked at him and Jeff thought he saw a trace of anger in her face. The total effect of four of them together was overwhelming. It intensified their alien appearance and manner.
Laura said, “You see, Jeffrey Rayden, we are still divided. Mike is our conformist. He detests untried solutions. He despises this whole assignment. Very primitive of him. We’ve given the two of you some very exhaustive tests, you know. Dos Almas is one of those tests. It did not exist before the aircraft landed. And it exists no longer. But for a time it was as real as this house. Mike wants us to erase your memories back to the point where you both became aware of something ‘odd’ about our Mister Borden Means. The rest of us think we can make our solution work.”
“Make what work?” He heard the blankness of his own tone.
The main door swung open and Sargo came in. He walked with bent-kneed cat-stride, the revolver looking the more deadly from the casual way he held it. Jeff was annoyed with himself for forgetting the gun stuffed inside his own belt.
“Okay, folks,” Sargo said, “Line up right over there along the wall.”
Not one of them moved. Sargo made an angry motion with the gun. “Move! You think I got faucet water in this thing?”
Jeff saw Laura glance at Mike. Mike looked steadily at Sargo. The lines of anger and resolution faded from Sargo’s face. He stared stupidly down at the gun in his hand. Then he looked at each of them in turn. “What makes?” he asked thickly. “Who...”
“That was a very neat erasure that Mike just performed,” Laura said.
“I’m sorry, Sargo,” Jeff said wanly.
“And who might you be, doc? Where am I? I’m sitting waiting for Mary and here I am inside some hallway pointing guns. Either I’m going nuts or Willis is spiking the beer.”
Laura gave Sargo a charming smile. “The hot sun will do that, Mister Sargo. Your ladder and tools are in the brush right outside the door and to the right. You can pick them up and go out the main gate and turn right. You’ll find your car not too far down the road.”
Sargo turned to go, shaking his head in a bewildered fashion.
Something grasped Jeff’s brain so strongly that it misted all his senses. He was conscious of his hand taking the gun out, reversing it, of his feet starting to carry him down the steps. Then the pressure was gone. Three of them were looking angrily at Mike. He had staggered back against the wall, his face pale, a film of sweat on his forehead.
“I’m sorry, Jeffrey Rayden,” Elaine said from the head of the stars. “We didn’t let him guide you long enough for any mental damage to occur. He shouldn’t have done it. He won’t do it again. Please take the gun to Mister Sargo.”
Sargo took the gun, looked blankly at it, recognized it as his own and left without another word.
“I’ll have Julie come down,” Laura said.
“This erasing,” Jeff said thickly. “That’s what you did to Looder and Lamke and the others.”
“That, too, causes a certain functional damage,” Paul said, speaking for the first time, “but not enough to make them less effective in their restricted existences. With you that damage would make a difference.”
“Only,” said Mike icily, “if their plan is approved.”
“Our plan will be approved,” Paul said. He turned to look at Julie who had appeared behind him, a pale green terry-cloth robe belted around her, her hair in disarray, her eyes sleepy and puzzled.
“Somebody called me and — Jeff! Jeff, what are you doing here! Why are all of you...” She made a sound suspiciously like a sob, hurried past Elaine and Paul and ran down the steps into Jeff’s arms, clinging to him, her fingers digging into his arms just above the elbows.
“We’re taking you to that building you’ve been so curious about. Don’t be alarmed. It will be easier to talk to you there,” Laura said. “Your... understanding will be improved.”
“But not enough,” Mike said.
The six of them walked through the moonlight. Jeff kept his arm around Julie. He could feel her tremble. Laura reached the door first. She touched it and it slid to one side. A subdued orange radiance shone out onto the ground. They went through a narrow hallway six feet long, smoothly metallic, and came into a small room in which the air seemed to throb.
As Jeff started to look around, the intense exhilaration struck him. He heard himself begin to giggle helplessly. Julie was laughing, the tears running down her face. It was like the contagion of laughter.
Paul had hurried to a small panel set into the smooth wall. The drunken feeling faded, but it didn’t go away completely. There was an old sensation of lightness, clarity and well-being. There was no room in his mind for fear.
Mike looked on with a sardonic expression.
“It was set just a bit too high for you,” Laura said.
The room, except for the regularly placed panel inserts, was featureless. There seemed to be no source for the soft orange radiance. Paul stepped to another panel and a thin, haunting, atonal melody began to fill the air, more felt than heard.
“We are far more comfortable here than in your — forgive us — crude environment,” Elaine said.
Paul had made yet another adjustment. One entire wall changed abruptly to utter blackness. Mike said, “Understand that they have no approval for this, you two.”
When Jeff looked behind him he saw six odd chair-like objects formed of coils of a soft substance. He had not seen them appear.
They were told to sit down. Paul brought Laura a gleaming circlet of metal and set it gently on her shining hair. All six of them sat, facing the dark wall.
Laura said, “I am explaining all this to you because I am in charge of this team. I will use your speech and visual explanation. I can cause any image I wish to appear on that wall. So do not let it frighten you. I can read your minds, and so I will adjust the speed of the explanation to suit the slowest one of you. If you have a question, please vocalize it. It makes it easier to read.”
The wall was filled with a billion shining stars.
Afterward, Jeff was to realize that the most incredible thing about the next hour was not the galactic scope of her story, nor was it the most casual references to incredible time spans, nor was it the oddness of the room in which they sat. It was his own willingness to believe — his own total lack of skepticism, as though something had caught and held his mind so that it could not twist away from facts which should normally have resulted in either a blank stare or a short laugh of incredulity.
It was a story to match the size of the sky.
She transposed the figures into the numerical system of the world of Jeff and Julie. The figures had the roar of distant thunder.
“This galaxy is called Reeth. It is like a vast hand, figures straight and close together. Your planet is at base of the palm. Our home planet, Syala, is at the fingertips. It is a hundred thousand light years from the fingertips to the base of the palm, and eleven thousand light years across the palm at its widest point. It contains forty billion suns, two hundred billion planets. Four billions of the two hundred billions of planets have had, or will have, a spontaneous generation of unicellular living creatures which will apex at last in a man-like creature — that is, an oxygen-breathing biped with articulated fingers at the ends of the other two limbs. This phenomenon is due to the origin of the galaxy. The universe began with the explosion of super-condensed matter. It continues to explode. All of the planets of Reeth, coming as they did from the same area within the super-condensed matter, have a homogeneity of basic elements which, once life is begun, must perforce funnel the life-apex into a man-like creature. Different gravities result in ‘distortions’. In more cases than not, Reethians developing independently on planets of similar gravities are so similar that when intermingled they can breed true.