My friend stretched forth a groping hand. Fumbling in the darkness, I found it. Our hands closed in a fierce grip, the handshake of men about to venture into the unknown.
I fought for control of my thoughts, centered them savagely upon the laboratory, recalling, with a supereffort, every detail of its interior. Then Scott must have shoved the power control full over. My body was pain-racked, then seemed to sway with giddiness. I forgot my body. The laboratory seemed nearer; it seemed to flash up at me. I was falling toward it, falling rapidly. I was a detached thought speeding along a directional line, falling straight into the laboratory… and I was very ill.
My fall was suddenly broken, without jar or impact.
I was standing in the laboratory. I could feel the cold of the floor beneath my feet.
I glanced sidewise and there stood Scott Marston and my friend was stark naked. Of course, we would be naked. Our clothing would not be transported through the time-power machine.
'It didn't kill us,' remarked Scott.
'Not even a scratch,' I asserted.
We faced each other and shook hands, solemnly, for again we had triumphed and that handshake was a self-imposed congratulation.
We turned back to the room before us. It was a colorful place. Varicolored liquids reposed in gleaming containers. The furniture, queerly carved and constructed along lines alien to any earthly standard, seemed to be of highly polished, iridescent wood. Through the windows poured a brilliant blue daylight. Great globes suspended from the ceiling further illuminated the building with a soft white glow.
A cone of light, a creamy white faintly tinged with pink, floated through an arched doorway and entered the room. We stared at it. It seemed to be light, yet was it light? It was not transparent and although it gave one the impression of intense brilliance, its color was so soft that it did not hurt one's eyes to look at it.
The cone, about ten feet in height, rested on its smaller end and advanced rapidly toward us. Its approach was silent. There was not even the remotest suggestion of sound in the entire room. It came to a rest a short distance in front of us and I had an uncanny sense that the thing was busily observing us.
'Who are you?'
The Voice seemed to fill the room, yet there was no one there but Scott and me, and neither of us had spoken. We looked at one another in astonishment and then shifted our gaze to the cone of light, motionless, resting quietly before us.
'I am speaking,' said the Voice and instantly each of us knew that the strange cone before us had voiced the words.
'I am not speaking,' went on the Voice. That was a misstatement. I am thinking. You hear my thoughts. I can as easily hear yours.'
Telepathy,' I suggested.
'Your term is a strange one,' replied the Voice, 'but the mental image the term calls up tells me that you faintly understand the principle.
T perceive from your thoughts that you are from a place which you call the Earth. I know where the Earth is located. I understand you are puzzled and discomfited by my appearance, my powers, and my general disresemblance to anything you have ever encountered. Do not be alarmed. I welcome you here. I understand you worked hard and well to arrive here and no harm will befall you.'
'I am Scott Marston,' said my friend, 'and this man is Peter Sands.'
The thoughts of the light-cone reached out to envelop us and there was a faint tinge of rebuke, a timbre of pity at what must have appeared to the thing as unwarranted egotism on our part.
'In this place there are no names. We are known by our personalities. However, as your mentality demands an identifying name, you may think of me as the Creator.
'And now, there are others I would have you see.'
He sounded a call, a weird call which seemed to incorporate as equally a weird name.
There was a patter of feet on the floor and from an adjoining room ran three animallike figures. Two were similar. They were pudgy of body, with thick, short legs which terminated in rounded pads that made sucking sounds as they ran. They had no arms, but from the center of their bulging chests sprang a tentacle, fashioned somewhat after the manner of an elephant's trunk, but with a number of small tentacles at its end. Their heads, rising to a peak from which grew a plume of gaily colored feathers, sat upon their tapering shoulders without benefit of necks.
The third was an antithesis of the first two. He was tall and spindly, built on the lines of a walking stick insect. His gangling legs were three-jointed. His grotesquely long arms dangled almost to the floor. Looking at his body, I believed I could have encircled it with my two hands. His head was simply an oval ball set on top of the sticklike body. The creature more nearly resembled a man than the other two, but he was a caricature of a man, a comic offering from the pen of a sardonic cartoonist.
The Creator seemed to be addressing the three.
'Here,' he said, 'are some new arrivals. They came here, I gather, in much the same manner you did. They are great scientists, great as yourselves. You will be friends.'
The Creator turned his attention to us.
'These beings which you see came here as you did and are my guests as you are my guests. They may appear outlandish to you. Rest assured that you appear just as queer to them.
They are brothers of yours, neighbors of yours. They are from your — .'
I received the impression of gazing down on vast space, filled with swirling motes of light.
'He means our solar system,' suggested Scott.
Carefully I built up in my mind a diagram of the solar system.
Wo!' The denial crashed like an angry thunderbolt upon us. Again the image of unimaginable space and of thousands of points of light — of swirling nebulae, of solar systems, mighty double suns and island universes.
'He means the universe,' said Scott.
'Certainly they came from our universe,' I replied. 'The universe is everything, isn't it — all existing things?'
Again the negative of the Creator burned its way into our brains.
'You are mistaken, Earthman. Your knowledge here counts as nothing. You are mere infants. But come; I will show you what your universe consists of.'
OUR UNIVERSE?
Streamers of light writhed down from the cone toward us. As we shrank back they coiled about our waists and gently lifted us. Soothing thoughts flowed over us, instructions to commit ourselves unreservedly to the care of the Creator, to fear no harm. Under this reassurance, my fears quieted. I felt that I was under the protection of a benevolent being, that his great power and compassion would shield me in this strange world. A Creator, in very truth!
The Creator glided across the floor to set us on our feet on the top of a huge table, which stood about seven feet above the floor level.
On the tabletop, directly before me, I saw a thin oval receptacle, made of a substance resembling glass. It was about a foot across its greatest length and perhaps a little more than half as wide and about four inches deep. The receptacle was filled with a sort of grayish substance, a mass of puttylike material. To me it suggested nothing more than a mass of brain substance.
'There,' said the Creator, pointing a light-streamer finger at the disgusting mass, 'is your universe.'
'What!' cried Scott.
'It is so,' ponderously declared the Creator.
'Such a thing is impossible,' firmly asserted Scott. 'The universe is boundless. At one time it was believed that it was finite, that it was enclosed by the curvature of space. I am convinced, however, through my study of time, that the universe, composed of millions of overlapping and interlocking dimensions, can be nothing but eternal and infinite. I do not mean that there will not be a time when all matter will be destroyed, but I do maintain — '