Chapter 14
The space around them was streaked with colored flames. The stars had vanished, and the planet too. The pegasone’s body loomed blood-red. As for the flames, they clashed and intertwined in great sheaves of luminance, but the space they wove back and forth in had no depth. Corson could not have said whether those flames were a few millimeters from his eyes, or light-years distant.
Maybe this was the real appearance of the universe. It was another aspect of it, anyway. The pegasones were moving through time at high velocity, he was sure of that. Which turned perspective topsyturvy. The regular image human beings had of the cosmos was essentially static. For them, stars moved only slowly in the heavens. The release of energy which gave them birth, then consumed them until nothing was left but a few cinders of inert and unbelievably dense matter, was far too slow for a man to perceive under normal circumstances. The greater part of the important events in the history of the universe did not affect him, for he was unaware of them. He could discern only a narrow band of the radiations permeating all of space. He could, live under the illusion that the cosmos is mainly composed of vacuum, of nothingness, that the stars—few and far between—are like a tenuous gas, a trifle more concentrated in the vicinity of a galaxy.
But in reality the universe was full. No point existed in space which did not at some given moment of time correspond to a particle, to a photon, to some manifestation of the primal energies. In a sense, the universe was solid. A supposititious observer looking at it from outside would not have found a way to stick a pin into it. And because the pegasones were moving so rapidly through time, their riders saw the universe as dense. If they reached Ultimate Velocity, Corson said to himself, if they found themselves present at the beginning and the end of the universe and at every instant between, they would purely and simply be squashed.
At the rate they were traveling, light vibrations were invisible. But those blue flames might be electromagnetic waves several light-years long, and those purple rays might correspond to variations in the gravitational field of the stars or of the galaxies themselves. They were literally crossing time at a gallop. And just as a rider on a horse going full tilt does not notice the stones on the roadway, but only the major items alongside it such as hills or trees, only the chief events of the universe were perceptible to them.
Now Corson’s thoughts took a different turn. He had been mistaken in assuming that Veran must have a starship. He and his men must have fled the scene of battle on steeds like this. They had just arrived when he and Antonella fell among them. Aergistal, then, might easily be at the other end of the universe.
The whirling of the flames diminished. They were slowing down. The luminous space around them split up into a horde of separate patches, which shrank as empty blackness gobbled them up, like the progression of a fatal disease. Soon they were surrounded only by bright points. Stars. Among them one alone remained two-dimensional, a disc of gold. A sun. They were spinning around and around. When the heavens ceased to revolve they found themselves once again above the cloud-enshrouded ball of a planet.
Not till then did Corson realize that the second pegasone had vanished. They had escaped their pursuers but they had lost their guide. They were alone above an unknown world, bound to a steed they had no idea how to control.
Chapter 15
Antonella recovered enough breath to ask: “Uria?”
“No,” Corson replied. “This planet is farther from its sun. The constellations aren’t the same here, either. We’ve traveled in space as well.”
The pegasone was going down, unhesitatingly, as though it knew its way, and shortly they were enveloped in cloud. A little lower, they passed through a belt of fine rain.
The rain stopped. They pierced through the clouds as though through a ceiling and discovered a plain of mown grass that seemed to go on for ever. A roadway glistening with rain striped across it. It began beyond the horizon and led to a colossal building: a parallelopiped of stone or concrete whose top was lost in mist. No trace of windows. Corson guessed that its narrowest face must be more than a kilometer along the base. It was bare, smooth, and gray.
The pegasone landed. Corson unhitched his straps. He went around the beast and helped Antonella to clamber down. Apparently satisfied, the pegasone started to graze with its tendrils, swallowing the grass in noisy gulps.
That grass was as neat as a lawn. The plain was so flat, indeed, that it seemed to Corson out of the question for it to be other than artificial. The roadway was of some brilliant blue substance. A kilometer away at most, the building reared up like a dizzying cliff.
“Ever seen this place before?” he asked.
Antonella shook her head.
“Does the layout suggest anything to you?” he pressed. “This plain, this grass, that building?”
Since she did not answer, he asked on the spur of the moment, “Well, then, what’s going to happen right now?”
“We’re going to the building. We’ll enter it. Up to then we won’t see anybody. Afterward, I don’t know.”
“There’s no danger?”
“None that I can cog.”
He stared at her. “Antonella, what do you make of all this?”
“I’m with you. That will do for the time being.”
He nearly snapped at her with annoyance, but controlled himself, and merely said, “Okay, let’s go!”
He started off with long strides, and she almost had to run to keep level with him. After a moment he regretted his anger and slowed down. Antonella was probably his only ally in the universe. Maybe that was why her company upset him.
The roadway ended at the foot of a huge door, hermetically sealed and matching the scale of the building, which practically merged with the wall. But when they arrived in front of it, it slid soundlessly upward. Corson strained his ears for any noise from within, but heard nothing. The whole setup made him think of a mousetrap.
For giant mice.
“If we go in, will the door shut behind us?”
Antonella closed her eyes.
“Yes. But nothing will threaten us inside, at least not for the first few minutes.”
They crossed the threshold. The door started to come down again. Corson stepped back. The door stopped, then rose again, indicating a simple automatic detector. He was much relieved. He had no special wish to explore the building without knowing more about it, but they could hardly stand around forever on that lawn. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they couldn’t eat grass. And eventually night would fall. It might be cold; it might be inhabited by enemies. They had to find shelter. Above all they had to abide by that oldest of all the military principles embodied in the Briefings: keep on the move, never stay put, try to take the enemy by surprise…
Not that it was so easy to surprise an opponent when you knew nothing about him.
Their eyes adjusted to the gloom in here. On both sides of an aisle which extended out of sight down a vast hall, geometrically exact structures reared up like the webs of a mathematically inclined spider, forming cells like those of a honeycomb. Those too continued to infinity, lost at last in a bluish mist.
The nearest cell contained ten girls’ bodies, completely nude, and shrouded by a faintly violet gas that stayed put although nothing seemed to be confining it. Motionless, as rigid as corpses, they were all very beautiful and might be aged eighteen to twenty-five. They bore a vague family resemblance to one another. Drawing a deep breath, Corson made a rough estimate: if every cell was filled the same way, then even in the small section of this monstrous hall that he could make guesses about there must be a good million bodies.