Automatically, Renark prepared himself for take-off, thanked the metazoa and pressed the drive control.
Then they were plunging upwards, cutting a pathway of law through the tumbling insanity of interplanetary space.
But this time there was no need to fight it. The conservator acted just as the Ekiversh had predicted, setting up a field all about itself where its own laws operated. Relieved, they had time to talk.
Asquiol had been taken aback by all the events and information he had received. He said: 'Renark, I'm still bewildered. Why exactly are we going to Roth?'
Renark's mood was detached, his voice sounding far away even to his own ears.
'To save the human race. I am realising now that the means of salvation are of a subtler kind than I previously suspected. That is all.'
'But surely we have lost sight of the original purpose for this mission? More - we are living in a fantasy world. This talk of reality is nonsense!'
Renark was not prepared to argue, only to explain.
'The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance!
'For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth.
'In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance, Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.
'We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!'
'And I.' Asquiol spoke softly, but with conviction. He paused and then added with a faint half-smile: 'Though you must forgive me if I still do not fully comprehend your, argument.'
'You'll understand it soon enough if things go right.' Renark smiled broadly. Roth now loomed huge on the laser screens.
With a deliberate lack of reverence, Asquiol commented: 'It looks like a great maggoty cheese, doesn't it?'
In the places seeming like glowing sores, they could see right through the planet. In other places there were gaps which jarred the eyes, numbed the mind.
Although they could see vaguely the circular outline, the planet was gashed as though some monstrous worm had chewed at it like a caterpillar on a leaf.
Refusing to let the sight overawe him - though it threatened to - Renark brought his skill as a Guide Senser to bear. Deliberately, yet warily, he probed the mass of the weird planet. Where the gaps were, he sensed occasionally the existence of parts of the planet which should, by all the laws he knew, be in the same space-time. But they were not - they existed outside in many other levels of the multiverse.
He continued to probe and at last found what he was searching for - sentient life. A warmth filled him momentarily.
Had he found the dwellers? These beings appeared not wholly solid, seemed to exist on all layers of the multiverse!
Could it be possible? He wondered. Did these beings exist on all planes and thus experience the full knowledge of reality, unlike the denizens who only saw their own particular universe and only experienced a fraction of the multi-verse?
Though he could conceive the possibility, his mind could not imagine what these beings might be like, or what they saw. Perhaps he would find out?
He understood now why Mary the Maze played insanely with her lifeless keyboard in a tavern on Entropium.
Another thought came to him and he felt about with his mind and learned, with a sinking regret, that the Shaarn had succeeded in beating back the Thron. He could not tell definitely, but it seemed that the Shifter's motion through the multiversal levels was slowing down.
Hastily he re-located the dwellers. There Were not many and they were on a part of the planet he felt he could find - a part not having its whole existence in the area now occupied by the Shifter, but probably visible to the human eye. With the aid of the conservator he felt fairly certain of finding the mysterious Hole.
Speed was important, but so was caution. He did not wish to suffer an ironical end - perishing now that he was so close to his goal.
He brought the ship down over a gap in order to test the conservator's powers.
They were extremely strong. As he came closer, the planet seemed to form itself under him as the missing piece shifted into place like a section of a jigsaw puzzle. It worked.
Now Renark lifted the ship away again and saw the piece fade back, wrenched into its previous continuum. He could not afford to land his ship on such a dangerous location. So he moved on and came down slowly on a surface which, he hoped, would remain in this continuum until he was ready to return.
If he did return, he told himself. The ominous activity near the binary was increasing, perhaps, already, the Shifter had stopped!
Asquiol was silent. He clutched the conservator to him as he followed Renark put of the ship's airlock.
The planet seemed a formless mass of swirling gases and they received a distinct sense of weightlessness for a moment as they placed their feet on its unnatural surface.
Dominated by the dreamlike insecurity of the planet, striking, first, patches of weightlessness, and later patches where their feet seemed entrenched in dragging mud, they moved warily on, Renark in the lead.
Though it was dark, the planet seemed to possess its own luminous aura, so that they could see a fair distance around them. But there were places where, somehow, their vision could not penetrate - yet they could see beyond these places! Even when they walked on rocky ground, it seemed impermanent.
As they moved, the area immediately around them would sometimes alter as the conservator exerted its strange power.
But, as if to compensate for this, new gaps continued to form elsewhere.
Straggling to keep his objective clear, Renark felt ahead with his mind, awed by the remarkable fluxions taking place constantly.
The planet was perpetually shifting. It was impossible to tell which part of it would be in existence even for a few moments at a time. Sundered matter, as chaotic as the unformed stuff of the multiverse at the dawn of creation, wrenched, spread and flung itself about as if in agony.
But, remorselessly, Renark pushed onward, filled with a sense of purpose which dominated his whole being.
Stumbling on, drunk by their visions of chaos, they did not lose their objective for a moment.
Sometimes near, sometimes distant, the Hole became their lodestar, beckoning them with a promise of truth - or destruction!
EIGHT
At last, after more than a weary day, they stood above the Hole, and as rock unformed itself and became gas, Renark said hollowly:
'They are in there. This is where we'll find them, but I do not know what they are.'
Though their tiredness made them inactive, Renark felt that he had never been more conscious, more receptive to what he saw. But his reception was passive. He could only look at the shifting, shining, dark and myriad-coloured Hole as it throbbed with power and energy.