The air, he found, was breathable. Buckling on his needle-beam, he stepped out on the stony ground. The hot gale tore at him, buffeting his face, whipping tears from his eyes. Wind-flung pebbles bounding along the ground stung his legs. Light from the sun burned his shoulders.
Lanarck inspected the terrain, to discover no sign of life, either from the white building or from Isabel May's space-boat. The ground stretched away, bare and sun-drenched, far into the dusty distances. Lanarck looked to the lonely white structure. She must be within. Here was the end of the chase which had brought him across the galaxy.
Lanarck circled the building. On the leeward side he found a low dark archway. From within came the heavy smell of life: an odor half animal, half reptile. He approached the entrance with his needle-beam ready.
He called out: "Isabel May!" He listened. The wind whistled by the corner of the building; little stones clicked past, blowing down the endless sun-dazzled waste. There was no other sound.
A sonorous voice entered his brain. "The one you seek is gone." Lanarck stood stock-still.
"You may come within, Earthman. We are not enemies." The archway loomed dark before him. Step by step he entered. After the glare of the white sun the dimness of the room was like a moonless night Lanarck blinked.
Slowly objects about him assumed form. Two enormous eyes peered through the gloom; behind appeared a tremendous domelike bulk. Thought surged into Lanarck's brain. "You are unnecessarily truculent. Here will be no occasion for violence."
Lanarck relaxed, feeling slightly at a loss. Telepathy was not often practiced upon Earth. The creature's messages came like a paradoxically silent voice, but he had no knowledge how to transmit his own messages. He hazarded the experiment.
"Where is Isabel May?"
"In a place inaccessible to you."
"How did she go? Her spaceboat is outside, and she landed but a half-hour ago."
"I sent her away."
Keeping his needle-beam ready, Lanarck searched the building. The girl was nowhere to be found. Seized by a sudden, fearful thought, he ran to the entrance and looked out. The two spaceboats were as he had left them. He shoved the needle-beam back into the holster and turned to the leviathan, in whom he sensed benign amusement.
"Well, then-who are you and where is Isabel May?"
"I am Laoome," came the reply. "Laoome, the one-time Third of Narfilhet, Laoome the World-Thinker - the Final Sage of the Fifth Universe ... As for the girl, I have placed her, at her own request, upon a pleasant but inaccessible world of my own creation."
Lanarck stood perplexed.
"Look!" Laoome said.
Space quivered in front of Lanarck's eyes. A dark aperture appeared in midair. Looking through, Lanarck saw hanging apparently but a yard before his eyes a lambent sphere-a miniature world. As he watched, it expanded like a toy balloon.
Its horizons vanished past the confines of the opening, Continents and oceans assumed shape, flecked with cloud-wisps. Polar ice caps glinted blue-white in the light of an unseen sun. Yet all the time the world seemed to be but a yard distant. A plain appeared, rimmed by black, flinty mountains. The color of the plain, a ruddy ocher, he saw presently, was due to a forest carpet of rust-colored foliage. The expansion ceased.
The World-Thinker spoke: "That which you see before you is matter as real and tangible as yourself. I have indeed created it through my mind. Until I dissolve it in the same manner, it exists. Reach out and touch it."
Lanarck did so. It was actually only a yard from his face, and the red forest crushed like dry moss under his fingertips.
"You destroyed a village," commented Laoome, and caused the world to expand once more at a breathtaking rate, until the perspectives were as if Lanarck hung a hundred feet above the surface. He was looking into the devastation which his touch had wrought a moment before. The trees, far larger than he had supposed, with boles thirty or forty feet through, lay tossed and shattered. Visible were the ruins of rude huts, from which issued calls and screams of pain, thinly audible to Lanarck. Bodies of men and women lay crushed. Others tore frantically at the wreckage.
Lanarck stared in disbelief. "There's life! Men!"
"Without life, a world is uninteresting, a lump of rock. Men, like yourself, I often use. They have a large capacity for emotion and initiative, a flexibility to the varied environments which I introduce."
Lanarck gazed at the tips of his fingers, then back to to the shattered village. "Are they really alive?"
"Certainly. And you would find, should you converse with one of them, that they possess a sense of history, a racial heritage of folklore, and a culture well-adapted to their environment."
"But how can one brain conceive the detail of a world? The leaves of each tree, the features of each man-"
"That would be tedious," Laoome agreed. "My mind only broadly conceives, introduces the determinate roots into the hypostatic equations. Detail then evolves automatically."
"You allowed me to destroy hundreds of these-men."
Curious feelers searched his brain. Lanarck sensed Laoome's amusement.
"The idea is repugnant? In a moment I shall dissolve the entire world... . Still, if it pleases you, I can restore it as it was. See!"
Immediately the forest was unmarred, the village whole again, secure and peaceful in a small clearing.
Awareness came to Lanarck of a curious rigidity in the rapport he had established with the World-Thinker. Looking about, he saw that the great eyes had glazed, that the tremendous black body was twitching and jerking. Now Laoome's dream-planet was changing. Lanarck leaned forward in fascination. The noble red trees had become gray rotten stalks and were swaying drunkenly. Others slumped and folded like columns of putty.
On the ground balls of black slime rolled about with vicious energy pursuing the villagers, who in terror fled anywhere, everywhere.
From the heavens came a rain of blazing pellets. The villagers were killed, but the black slime-things seemed only agonized. Blindly they lashed about, burrowed furiously into the heaving ground to escape the impacts. More suddenly than it had been created, the world vanished. Lanarck tore his gaze from the spot where the world had been. He looked about and found Laoome as before.
"Don't be alarmed." The thoughts came quietly. "The seizure is over. It occurs only seldom, and why it should be I do not know. I imagine that my brain, under the pressure of exact thought, lapses into these reflexive spasms for the sake of relaxation. This was a mild attack. The world on which I am concentrating is usually totally destroyed."
The flow of soundless words stopped abruptly. Moments passed. Then thoughts gushed once more into Lanarck's brain.
"Let me show you another planet-one of the most interesting I have ever conceived. For almost a million Earth years it has been developing in my mind."
The space before Lanarck's eyes quivered. Out in imaginary void hung another planet. As before, it expand until the features of the terrain assumed an earthly perspective. Hardly a mile in diameter, the world was divided around the equator by a belt of sandy desert. At one end glimmered a lake, at the other grew a jungle of lush vegetation.
From this jungle now, as Lanarck watched, crept a semi-human shape. A travesty upon man, its face was long, chinless and furtive, with eyes beady and quick. The legs were unnaturally long; the shoulders and arms were undeveloped. It slunk to the edge of the desert, paused a moment, looking carefully in both directions, then began a mad dash through the sand to the lake beyond.
Halfway across, a terrible roar was heard. Over the the horizon bounded a dragonlike monster. With fearsome speed it pursued the fleeing man-thing, who outdistanced it and gainied the edge of the desert by two hundred feet. When the dragon came to the limits of the sandy area, it halted abd bellowed an eerie mournful note which sent shivers down Lanarck's spine. Casually now, the man-thing loped to the lake, threw himself flat and drank deeply.