“The Moon! Unstable lunar influences!” Hargate squirmed in his chair. “When you get on to something you really stick with it, don’t you?”
“It’s the only way, my friend.” Lorrest smiled as he again opened his wallet and selected a rectangular scrap of paper from a slim bundle. “I’ll bet you anything you like that Vekrynn doesn’t even know that tools like this exist.”
“Is there anything about us that you can’t blame on the Moon?”
“His mind is as stagnant as Mollanian technology itself, and that’s saying something.”
“How about the shape of our heads? Or the smell of our socks?”
“The design of a Mollanian artifact can remain unchanged for thousands of years. If it weren’t for organisations like 2H there’d be virtually no creative thinking.”
“Scrotum fillers to you,” Hargate snapped, wheeling his chair away. He positioned himself at the rear of the cabin, scowling, refusing to acknowledge the wave Lorrest gave him a minute later when the aircraft’s door swung itself shut. He expected to hear engines starting up, but within a few seconds there was a change in the quality of light streaming in through the windows and he realised the aircraft was rising vertically, in total silence. At a height of about a hundred metres the movement was translated into horizontal flight and the landscape began to flow beneath with increasing rapidity.
Hargate studied the complex of geographical features. The incredible clarity of the air seemed to suspend the rules of perspective, creating a new kind of space in which distant peaks perched confusingly on the slopes of nearer mountains, and in which remote blue seas hung in flat suspension above middle-ground lakes. He tried to visualise what they would find at the end of the flight—a secret pleasure dome, perhaps, or a simple hermitage—but the wealth of microscopic detail quickly became numbing to the mind, making it expedient for him to turn his attention to the aircraft’s interior.
“How old do you reckon this flivver is?” he said to Lorrest, reopening communications.
“Five or six centuries at the most,” Lorrest replied. “After that you start getting too many structural failures and it’s easier to switch to a new machine.”
“I see.” Intrigued by the possibility that the aircraft had been ferrying Mollanian children around their world at the time of Columbus, Hargate prowled about the cabin, opening drawers and lockers, occasionally discovering traces of occupation. In one place he found a small engraved bracelet, in another a magnifying glass—apparently commonplace objects which, because of their origins, he saw as archaeological treasures, worth stowing away in his pockets.
He had almost completed his meagre plundering when he noticed, tucked into a recess below a window, a complicated metal object which looked like an engineering instrument in some respects and in others like one of the mathematical sculptures he had once constructed for a living. It had a central spine from which sprouted numerous slim telescopic rods, all finely graduated, terminating in a glittering strip of silver. Hargate stared at it with a greedy quickening of his heart, intuitively identifying it as having something to do with Mollanian instantaneous travel. He snatched it from the recess and went forward to where Lorrest was sitting in the nose of the aircraft.
“It’s a child’s trainer,” Lorrest explained, taking the object and casually remoulding the bright strip to a new shape. “They use it to set up basic mnemo-curves.”
“How about me?” Hargate reached for the trainer with covetous fingers. “Do you think I could learn to skord?”
Lorrest gave him a searching glance. “You keep coming back to that, don’t you?”
“You don’t understand—this what I had in place of religion. As a kid, I only saw Gretana once at Cotter’s Edge, but that was all I needed. I never told anybody about seeing her, but all my life I knew there were people to whom the ordinary rules didn’t apply, and that was very important to me. As far as I was concerned, you see, we had a bad set of rules. It comforted me to know there was a bigger and better game going on somewhere. I suppose I was nursing a secret hope that some day I’d be invited to play. Does that sound crazy to you?”
“I think I understand,” Lorrest said. “But why is it so important for you to skord?”
“It’s part of my personal mathematics. I like the idea of reducing time to the status of an ordinary dimension, and that’s because I’m short of time.” Hargate hesitated, wondering if he could ever get his point of view across to the Mollanian. “I’ve only got a year or so left—perhaps a lot less—and I want to make the maximum use of it. Mathematically speaking, I want to extend myself in three dimensions to compensate for deficiencies in the fourth.”
Lorrest gazed at him for a few seconds, his eyes becoming lensed with tears. “Why is there no justice, Denny?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I think of the way most of my people squander all those centuries they’ve grabbed for themselves…those pale ghosts of human beings…while you’ve got enough courage for…for…”
“Courage my ass,” Hargate put in. “How about it? Can you teach me to skord?”
“I honestly don’t know. Right from infancy Mollanians are aware of living in a matrix of third-order forces, and that seems to give us an in-built mathematical faculty that a Terran might never be able to acquire.”
Hargate refused to be discouraged. “Come on! I know all about homeomorphism and algebraic topology and theory of functions, and I’ve read Riemann and Hu and Wilder and people like that. You can’t be all that much smarter than I am. What do you say?”
“Your Terran maths might be a handicap. You’d have to unlearn some of it.”
“So I’ll unlearn—what do you say?”
Lorrest smiled helplessly. “Well, we’re going to be airborne on autopilot for a few hours before we reach Vekrynn’s pied-à-terre, or whatever we’re looking for…Maybe I could force some elementary maths into your skull.”
“And I’ll pay you back,” Hargate promised. “I’ll try to force some elementary manners into yours.”
The structure was a featureless slab of concrete, like a single huge building block that had been dropped in a forest clearing. Mosses and vines had attached themselves to much of the surface without softening the uncompromising lines. Only in one place, where a fallen tree formed a sloping catwalk from ground to roof, had the environment made any headway in obliterating the unnatural intrusion.
“No attempt at concealment here,” Lorrest commented. “Either Vekrynn was confident nobody would get this far, or he realised that if they did they weren’t going to be put off.”
Hargate ran his gaze over the wall towards which he was being propelled and picked out the faint outline of a door which also seemed to be made of concrete. “It doesn’t look much like a country residence.”
“No, it has to be a store, a glorified strongbox. The only question is—what’s inside?”
“I’ll bet it takes more than one of your intelligent playing cards to open it.”
“Unbeliever!” Lorrest brought the wheelchair to a halt and went towards the door, already opening his wallet. “The locks are undoubtedly the best that Vekrynn could buy, borrow or steal, which means they were probably manufactured on Mollan around the time the Normans were invading England. Our establishment engineers are handicapped, of course. One thing about our longevity that nobody seemed to anticipate was the stultifying effect on designers—it’s very difficult to find materials that last as long as we do.”
Hargate sniffed noisily to express a bitter amusement. The tranquillity of the surrounding forest and the mellow coppery radiance from the setting sun reminded him of the long summer evenings of boyhood, those evenings on which time seemed to relent and cease its persecution, but he was not deceived. The caravan was still winding its way towards the dawn of nothing. In the solitude of the previous day he had persuaded himself that, as far as the mathematics of eternity was concerned, there was no difference between a lifespan of four decades and one of four millennia—all fractions with infinity as the bottom line had to equal zero—but one had to be in a certain mood to accept that kind of reasoning…