Again Clarke thought of The God, who had wrought a Great Change out of a formless void and willed a universe. And the thought also occurred to Clarke: Harry, we shouldn't be here. This isn't our place… His unspoken words dinned like gongs in his brain, deafeningly loud! And apparently in Harry's, too.
Take it easy, said the Necroscope. No need to shout here.
Of course not, for in the total absence of everything else, even thoughts had extraordinary mass. We're not meant to be here, Clarke insisted. And Harry, I'm scared witless! For God's sake, don't let go of me!
Of course not, came the answer. And no need to feel afraid. Harry's mental voice was calm. But I can feel and 1 understand what it's like for you. Still, can't you also feel the magic of it? Doesn't it thrill you to your soul?
And as his panic began to subside, Clarke had to admit that it did. Slowly the tension went out of him and he began a gradual relaxation; in another moment he believed he could sense matterless forces working on him. 1 feel… a pull, like the wash of a tide, he said.
Not a pull, a push, Harry corrected him. The Mobius Continuum doesn't want us. We're like motes in its immaterial eyes. It would expel us if it could, but we won't be here that long. If we stayed still for long enough, it would try to eject us — or maybe ingest us! There are a million million doors it could push us through; any one of them could be fatal to us, I fear, in one way or another. Or we could simply be subsumed, made to conform — which in this place means eradicated! I discovered long ago that you either master the Mobius Continuum, or it masters you! But of course that would mean us standing still for an awfully long time — forever, by mundane terms.
Harry's statement didn't improve Clarke's anxiety. How long are we staying here! he wanted to know. Hell, how long have we been here?
A minute or a mile, Harry answered, to both of your questions! A light-year or a second. Listen, I'm sorry, we won't be here long. But to me, when I'm here, questions like that don't have much meaning. This is a different continuum; the old constants don't apply. This place is the DNA of space and time, the building-blocks of physical reality. But… it's difficult stuff, Darcy. I've had lots of 'time' to think about it, and even I don't have all the answers. All of them? Hah! I have only a handful! But the things I can do here, I do them well. And now I want to show you something.
Wait! said Clarke. It's just dawned on me: what we're doing here is telepathy. So this is how it feels for the telepaths back at HQ!
Not exactly, Harry answered. Even the best of them aren't as good as this. In the Mobius Continuum, he explained, thoughts have matter, weight. That's because they are in fact physical things in an immaterial place. Consider a tiny meteorite in space — which can punch a hole through the skin of a space-probe! There's something of a similarity. Issue a thought here and it goes on forever, just as light and matter go on forever in our universe. A star is born, and we see it blink into life billions of years later, because that's how long it took its light to reach us.
That's what thought is like here: long after we're gone, our thoughts will still exist here. But you're right to a degree — about telepathy, I mean. Perhaps telepaths have a way of tapping in — a mental system which they themselves don't understand — to the Mobius Continuum! And Harry chuckled. There's 'a thought' for you! But if that's the case, how about seers, eh? What about your prognosticators? Clarke didn't immediately grasp his meaning. I'm sorry
Well, if the telepaths are using the Mobius Continuum, however unconsciously, what of the forecasters? Are they also 'tapping in', to scry into the future?
Clarke was apprehensive again. Of course, he said, I'd forgotten that. You can see into the future, can't you?
Something of it, Harry answered. In fact I can go there! In my incorporeal days I could even manifest myself in past and future time, but now that I have a body again that's beyond me — so far, anyway. But I can still follow past and future time-streams, so long as I stick to the Mobius Continuum. And I can see you've guessed it: yes, that's what I want to show you — the future, and the past.
Harry, I don't know if I'm ready for this. I -
We're not actually going there, Harry calmed him. We'll just take a peek, that's all. And before Clarke could protest, he opened a door on future time.
Clarke stood with Harry on the threshold of the future-time door and his mind was almost paralysed by the wonder and awe of it. All was a chaos of millions — no, billions — of lines of pure blue light etched against an otherwise impenetrable background eternity of black velvet. It was like some incredible meteor shower, where all of the meteors raced away from him into unimaginable deeps of space, except their trails didn't dim but remained brilliantly printed on the sky — printed, in fact, on time! And the most awesome thing was this: that one of these twining, twisting streamers of blue light issued outwards from himself, extending or extruding from him and plummeting away into the future. Beside Clarke, Harry produced another blue thread. It ribboned out of him and shot away on its own neon course into tomorrow.
What are they? Clarke's question was a whisper in the metaphysical Mobius ether.
Harry was also moved by the sight. The life-threads of humanity, he answered. That's all of Mankind — of which these two here, yours and mine, make up the smallest possible fraction. This one of mine used to be Alec Kyle's, but at the end it had grown very dim, almost to the point of expiring. Right now, though -
It's one of the brightest! And suddenly Clarke found himself completely unafraid. Even when Harry said:
Only pass through this door, and you'd follow your life-thread to its conclusion. I can do it and return — indeed I have done it — but not to the very end. That's something I don't want to know about. I'd like to think there isn't an end, that Man goes on forever. He closed the door, opened another. And this time he didn't have to say anything.
It was the door to the past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. The myriad blue life-threads were there as before; but this time, instead of expanding into the distance, they contracted and narrowed down, targeting on a far-away dazzling blue origin.
Before Harry could close that door, too, Clarke let the scene sear itself into his memory. If from this time forward he got nothing else out of life, this adventure in the Mobius Continuum was something he wanted to remember to his dying day.
But finally the door on the past was closed, there was sudden, swift motion, and -
We're home! said Harry…
8. Through the Gate
A fourth and final door was opened and Clarke felt himself urged through it. But the abrupt sensation of speed in motion had alarmed and shaken him, and as yet he hadn't recovered.
Harry? he said, the thought trembling like a leaf in the immaterial void of the Mobius Continuum. 'Harry?'
Except the second time it was his voice he heard, not just his thoughts. He stood with Harry Keogh in his office at E-Branch HQ, in London. Stood there for a moment, stumbled, and reeled!
The real, physical world — of gravity, light, all human sensation and especially sound, most definitely sound — impressed itself forcefully on Clarke's unprepared person. It was signing-off time for most of the staff; many had already left, but the Duty Officer and a handful of others were still here. And of course the security system was in operation as always. Sleepers had started to go off all over the top-floor complex as soon as Clarke and Keogh appeared, quietly at first but gradually increasing in pitch and frequency until they would soon become unbearable. A monitor screen in the wall close to Clarke's desk stuttered into life and printed up: