‘But this is madness!’ gasped Lapointe. ‘All you will succeed in doing is harming hundreds of innocent people. You will be defeated again. Your logic is entirely flawed. Captain Goering.’
‘Nonsense. You are addressing the cream of the Nazi elite!’ put in Herr Goebbels. ‘Our plan is flawless!’
‘Has Herr Klosterheim talked you into this?’ asked Bardot, through gritted teeth. His wound had, for the moment, stopped bleeding. He assured his friends that he had only sustained a flesh wound. Slowly the group had come to a halt at the very edge of the silvery road through the multiverse.
‘We have perfected this plan together with Herr Klosterheim’s involvement,’ said Hess, his strange eyes shifting from one to the other. ‘By Sunday Europe will have accepted the reality of a new Germany. We already know that many Frenchmen as well as English aristocrats will flock to our standard!’
‘Klosterheim uses you for his own purposes,’ said Begg quietly. ‘He has beguiled you, as he has beguiled so many others. He has no interest in reviving Nazi Germany or, indeed, doing anything but gaining control of the Cosmic Balance. Mrs Persson, you know this to be true!’
‘I have no reason to disbelieve him, Sir Seaton.’ With a low laugh the adventuress turned away.
Now again came the rhythmic booming as of some great drum. Most of them shivered as they heard it, standing at the beginning of the moonbeam roads. Motioning again with their pistols, the Nazis forced Begg and Co. to move ahead. By the second, the noise of the great regulator came closer. And the vision of the multiverse grew more vivid, the roads more colourful and complex.
The detectives gasped. Below, above, on every side of them, the distance was filled with glowing silvery roads, twisting in all directions and forming an extraordinary labyrinth. On this spiderweb of pathways, unconscious of the drama being played between the Nazis and their enemies, travellers walked between a million and more realities.
‘Where are they going, Begg?’ murmured Dr Sinclair.
Begg’s own face was alive with wonderment. ‘I had heard of this… Sinclair, old friend, these people are walking the moonbeam roads between the worlds. Simply – walking across the multiverse!’
Klosterheim read the bewilderment in Taffy’s eyes. ‘Do not fear, doctor. You will soon have the whole of eternity to contemplate this puzzle. Now – move on. There are still more wonders to greet you…’
Bardot groaned, evidently believing himself feverish. He was the only one of the prisoners not to be bound. His arm hung limp at his side and his right hand staunched the blood from his wounded shoulder. He seemed dazed, unable to accept the actuality of these events. He looked up through the swirling, scintillating colour which filled the great ether, the shimmering lines of light cutting between them, the distant figures, the immense beauty of it all. Then he looked back at the grotesquely grinning uniformed men training their Lugers on the captured detectives. Behind them, removing the black diamond mask he affected, Klosterheim stood stock still. He had wrapped his great cloak around him, as if against a chill, though the temperature was moderate. From within the head the cold eyes shifted from face to face, offering no expression, no sense of any humanity.
To Begg’s certain knowledge, the former priest was virtually indestructible. Like Zenith, like Mrs Persson herself, he was an eternal, one of those whose longevity was considerably greater than that of an ordinary human being. He was accustomed to life in the semi-finite. Some said they sustained their long lives by dreaming a thousand years for every day of their ordinary existence and that what we witnessed were dream projections, not the actual person. That most of them lived forever was, in Begg’s opinion, debatable. Yet those who had encountered Klosterheim over the centuries came to believe that he had truly been one of Satan’s favourite accomplices, until the time when Satan himself sought reconciliation with their former lord. Then Klosterheim had turned against Satan, too. As he perceived it, he had been betrayed by the two mightiest masters in his universe. For all his well-hidden spirituality, Begg was not a man to accept superstition or supernatural explanation, but he could almost believe the stories as he stared back at Klosterheim. Begg’s own face was expressionless as he considered ways and means of turning the tables on their captors.
Step by remorseless step they moved along the opaque, silvery causeway towards that sonorous booming until at last the road ended abruptly, upon the edge of the void, its silver falling away like mist. For the first time a smile crossed Klosterheim’s thin, bloodless lips. And he looked down.
Begg was the first to follow his gaze.
The detective’s first instinct was to step back. He stifled a sound. There, immediately below them, its blade pointing down into the dancing, obscuring mist, he made out the shape of a gigantic black sword fashioned to resemble a balance, with a cup depending from either arm. Within the metal of the black blade scarlet characters writhed and twisted while the cups moved slowly, gleaming like jewelled gold. It was as if they measured the weight of the world’s pain. Multicoloured strands of ectoplasm swirled from the cups and Begg knew in his soul that he did indeed look upon the legendary Cosmic Balance, which regulated the entire multiverse, weighing Law and Chaos, good and evil, truth and falsehood, life and death, love and hate, maintaining all the equilibrium and therefore the existence of all man created matter.
In spite of the booming voice of the swaying arm, Klosterheim’s cold tones could be heard clearly. ’If the multiverse has a centre, then this can be said to be it. I have sought it for many years and across many universes. And you, gentlemen, will have the privilege of seeing it before you die. Indeed,’ and now he chuckled to himself, ‘you will always see it before you die…’
Now it was Lapointe’s turn to speak. ‘You are a dangerous fool, M’sieu Klosterheim, if you believe you can control that symbol of eternal justice. Only God Almighty has any way of altering the scales maintaining the balance between Law and Chaos. What you see is doubtless only one manifestation of the Cosmic Balance. Can you control a symbol?’
’Perhaps not,’ came the sweet, calm voice of Mrs Persson. She had turned up the collar of her long, military coat. Framed by her helmet of dark hair, her beautiful, pale, oval face shone with the reflected light of the great scale. Her indigo eyes were sardonic. ‘But the one who gives power to the symbol can sometimes control what it controls…’
Lapointe turned away from her with an expression of disgust.
Hitler, Hess, Goering, Röhm and Goebbels had crowded to the edge of the road to stare down at the great balance. ‘All we need now is to set into that hilt the Star of Judea,’ said the Nazi colonel.