Lanarck moved restlessly. Outside the wind tore past the building. Laoome continued silent, dreaming perhaps of the dark oceans of ancient Narfilhet. Lanafck impatiently launched a thought.
"How do I reach Markawel? And how do I return?"
Laoome fetched himself back to the present. His eyes settled upon a point beside Lanarck. The aperture which led into his various imaginary spaces was now wrenched open the third time. A little distance off in the void, a spaceboat drifted. Lanarck's eyes narrowed with sudden interest.
"That's a 45-G-my own ship!" he exclaimed.
"No, not yours. One like it. Yours is still outside." The craft drew nearer? gradually floated within reach.
"Climb in," said Laoome. "At present Isabel May is in the city which lies at the apex of the triangular continent." "But how do I get back?"
"Aim your ship, when you leave Markawel, at the brightest star visible. You will then break through the mental dimensions into this universe."
Lanarck reached his arm into the imaginary universe and pulled the imagined space-boat close to the aperture. He opened the port and gingerly stepped in as Laoome's parting thoughts reached him.
"Should you fall into danger, I can not modify the natural course of events. On the other hand, I will not intentionally place dangers in your way. If such befall you, it will be due solely to circumstance."
Lanarck slammed shut the port, half expecting the ship to dissolve under his feet. But the ship was solid enough. He looked back. The gap into his own universe had disappeared, leaving in its place a brilliant blue star. He found himself in space. Below glimmered the disk of Markawel, much like other planets he had approached from the void. He tugged at the throttle, threw the nose hard over and down. Let the abstracts take care for themselves. The boat dropped down at Markawel.
It seemed a pleasant world. A hot white sun hung off in space; blue oceans covered a large part of the surface. Among the scattered land masses he found the triangular continent. It was not large. There were mountains with green-forested slopes and a central plateau: a not un-Earth-like scene, and Lanarck did not feel the alien aura which surrounded most extraterrestrial planets.
Sighting through his telescope Lanarck found the city, sprawling and white, at the mouth of a wide river. He sent his ship streaking down through the upper atmosphere, then slowed and leveled off thirty miles to sea. Barely skimming the sparkling blue waves, he flew toward the city.
A few miles to the left an island raised basalt cliffs against the ocean. In his line of sight there heaved up on the crest of a swell a floating black object. After an instant it disappeared into the trough: a ramshackle raft. Upon it a girl with tawny golden hair desperately battled sea-things which sought to climb aboard.
Lanarck dropped the ship into the water beside the raft The wash threw the raft up and over and down on the girl.
Lanarck slipped through the port and dived into clear green water. He glimpsed only sub-human figures paddling downward, barely discernible. Bobbing to the surface, he swam to the raft, ducked under, grasped the girl's limp form, pulled her into the air.
For a moment he clung to the raft to catch his breath, while holding the girl's head clear of the water. He sensed the return of the creatures from below. Dark forms rose in the shadow cast by the raft, and a clammy, long-fingered hand wound around his ankle. He kicked and felt his foot thud into something like a face. More dark forms came up from the depths. Lanarck measured the distance to his spaceboat, Forty feet. Too far. He crawled onto the raft, and pulled the girl after him. Leaning far out, he recovered the paddle and prepared to smash the first sea-thing to push above water. But instead, they swam in tireless circles twenty feet below.
The blade of the paddle had broken, Lanarck could not move the unwieldly bulk of the raft. The breeze, meanwhile, was easing the spaceboat even farther away. Lanarck exerted himself another fifteen minutes, pushing against the water with the splintered paddle, but the gap increased He cast down the paddle in disgust and turned to the girl, who, sitting cross-legged, regarded him thoughtfully. For no apparent reason, Lanarck was reminded of Laoome in the dimness of his white building, on the windy world. All this, he thought, looking from clear-eyed girl to heaving sun-lit sea to highlands of the continent ahead, was an idea in Laoome's brain.
He looked back at the girl. Her bright wheat-colored hair frothed around her head in ringlets, producing, thought Lanarck, a most pleasant effect. She returned his gaze for a moment, then, with jaunty grace, stood up.
She spoke to Lanarck who found to his amazement that he understood her. Then, remembering Laoome's manipulation of his brain, extracting ideas, altering, instilling new concepts, he was not so amazed.
"Thank you for your help," she said. "But now we are both in the same plight."
Lanarck said nothing. He knelt and began to remove his boots.
"What will you do?"
"Swim," he answered. The new language seemed altogether natural.
"The Bottom-people would pull you under before you went twenty feet." She pointed into the water, which teemed with circling dark shapes. Lanarck knew she spoke the truth.
"You are of Earth also?" she asked, inspecting him carefully.
"Yes. Who are you and what do you know of Earth?"
"I am Jiro from the city yonder, which is Gahadion. Earfh is the home of Isabel May, who came in a ship such as yours."
"Isabel May arrived but an hour ago! How could you know about her?"
"An hour?" replied the girl. "She has been here three months!" This last a little bitterly.
Lanarck reflected that Laoome controlled time in his universes as arbitrarily as he did space. "How did you come to be here on this raft?"
She grimaced toward the island. "The priests came for me. They live on the island and take people from the mainland. They took me but last night I escaped."
Lanarck looked from the island to the city on the mainland. "Why do not Gahadion authorities control the priests?"
Her lips rounded to an O. "They are sacred to the Great God Laoome, and so inviolate."
Lanarck wondered what unique evolutionary process Laoome had in progress here.
"Few persons thus taken return to the mainland," she went on. "Those who win free, and also escape the Bottom-people, usually live in the wilderness. If they return to Gahadion they are molested by fanatics and sometimes recaptured by the priests."
Lanarck was silent. After all, it concerned him little how these people fared. They were beings of fantasy, inhabiting an imaginary planet. And yet, when he looked at Jiro, detachment became easier to contemplate than to achieve.
"And Isabel May is in Gahadion?"
Tiro's lips tightened. "No. She lives on the island. She is the Thrice-Adept, the High Priestess."
Lanarck was surprised. "Why did they make her High Priestess?"
"A month after she arrived, the Hierarch, learning of the woman whose hair was the color of night, even as yours, tried to take her to Drefteli, the Sacred Isle, as a slave. She killed him with her weapon. Then when the lightnings of Laoome did not consume her, it was known that Laoome approved, and so she was made High Priestess in place of the riven Hierarch."
The philosophy, so Lanarck reflected, would have sounded naive on Earth, where the gods were more covert in their supervision of human affairs.
"Is Isabel May a friend of yours-or your lover?" asked Jiro softly.
"Hardly."
'Then what do you want with her?"
"I've come to take her back to Earth," He looked dubiously across the ever-widening gap between the raft and his spaceboat. "That at least was my intention."