"Oh, how beautiful I am!" she caroled, with an air of innocent vainglory. "Tell me, did you ever see anything so beautiful before?"
"Never in my life," I assured her. "It's – " My jaw snapped shut on the last word. My muscles tightened and without the least conscious volition I found I had turned my back to her and was marching down the path toward the matter-transmitter. In my brain a cool, metallic mind seemed to be saying with an intonation of despair, "Human beings!"
It was interesting to watch my own hands manipulating the buttons that selected the proper wave-bands for our destination. The process looked far too simple – there were only half a dozen buttons in all – but I assumed the Mechandroid, gazing through my eyes, tightening and releasing my muscles, knew what he was doing.
He did. The room shimmered before me, disorientation and brief nausea shook us both together in gigantic oblivion and –
We emerged into a large underground concourse – I think it was underground; it sounded and felt like it – thronged with busy men and women who paid me only the slightest of glancing attention as I pushed among them, half guided now and half of my own volition. There were people here in costumes so various that I suppose my own clothing was no more outlandish than anyone else's.
I think this was a nexus in the great web of matter-transmission, under the surface of what planet I have no idea.
People from colonies all over the Galaxy must have changed stations here. I know I attracted no attention as I hurried through the cosmopolitan crowd toward a row of transmission rooms in the center of the concourse, closed the door behind me, manipulated more buttons.
It was curious, I thought to myself as the familiar disorientation swam through my brain, how little I was seeing of this marvelous world of the middle future. Topaz had assured me that cities were obsolete and mankind lived in luxurious isolation wherever his fancy dictated.
Yet all I had seen so far, except for the Swan Garden, had been the underpinnings of the culture, the girders upon which its farming luxuries were builded. What lay above-ground, on the flowering surfaces of the planets, I was not to know, then or – perhaps – ever.
The room steadied about me. The door slid open.
I looked down a long corridor bathed in white light.
"This is the Subterrane," Belem's voice in my brain said.
17. THE WORLD OF BELEM
Had I been expecting something semi-miraculous I should have been disappointed. I had seen similar passages under Grand Central Station. Here there was nothing at all unusual – simply a white corridor, empty and silent.
"In your day," the Mechandroid told me, "this would have been a grouping of thick doors and locks. The Subterrane is the arsenal of the government. It isn't on Earth. Walk forward."
I obeyed. I felt a brief tingling, a rather pleasant vibration that passed and was gone.
"You have just passed between a cathode and anode that would have disrupted the brain of any Mechandroid. The pattern is keyed so that it's harmless to humans. No Mechandroid has ever been permitted in the Subterrane – till now."
So they were vulnerable after all.
"Why, yes," Belem remarked, surprised. "Every existing thing is capable of negation – of altering its condition to non-existence. The less adaptable an organism, the easier it is to destroy. But this cathode-anode device is not portable and its field is quite limited.
"It is useful only for defense – not for offense. You would be destroyed, too, if you hurled yourself on a sharpened stake. The other devices are aimed at human beings who aren't wearing the protective helmets. Luckily – "
I wasn't in a corridor any more. Not a normal corridor. Planar geometry had suddenly and empirically been disproved. My eyes, conditioned to normal perspective, went dizzily out of focus as abruptly as gravity itself seemed to alter.
You can't describe the indescribable. Lines of perspective meet at the vanishing point – sure. So they say. But the walls and floor and ceiling of the white-lit tunnel curved in insanely a few feet ahead of me, crossed somehow and re-extended themselves toward me like a tapering cone. Such distortions of matter may be normal at the end of the universe but you shouldn't be able to reach out and touch – Touch? But I couldn't even do that. Gravity had gone wrong, too. I suspected there was a riptide in the semicircular canals of my ears. Because I felt that I was falling, no matter in what direction I looked.
There was no corridor. There was only white emptiness. Dead white and featureless except for the cone that pointed accusingly at me. I tried to move forward and a horrible, sick, giddiness loosened my muscles and then tightened them again as I strained to stand rigid. As long as I didn't move an inch I might not fall.
"Walk forward!" the voice in my mind insisted. I shut my eyes and walked forward. At Belem's annoyed command, I reopened them and either fell or ran toward the white cone that was the corridor itself extended beyond infinity and in geometric reversal. As I moved I found myself curving away, along the line of the distortion, so that without knowing how it had happened I was hurrying in the opposite direction with my back to the cone.
"I can't do this too often without resting," Belem said. "Open your mind. Relax. Let me control your muscles. This illusion is for human eyes only. I can screen it out and see the right way."
It took tremendous effort on my part to keep my eyes open and my muscles relaxed. That disgusting falling sensation kept growing stronger and every sane instinct I had reacted violently at what my optic nerves described. I was walking into a vanishing point – that was the only way to describe it. I walked right into the point of the white cone and through it – don't ask me how, because it was an illusion – and then I was in the white corridor again.
I took ten unsteady steps, and came out into a wider tunnel that stretched, curving, to left and to right. Belem guided me to the left.
There were hieroglyphics on the walls at regular intervals but I didn't realize they indicated doors until the Mechandroid told me to stop. All I had to do was touch the wall and a shutter opened like a cat's-eye, slitted, then oval, enlarging till I could step through into the room beyond. Behind me the panel closed noiselessly.
It was a large room and there was a matter-transmitter in a corner. The walls were banked with paneling carrying the most complicated set of controls I had ever seen. On a glassy pillar in the center of the floor was a transparent box, small enough to hold in my palm, and it was bathed in a sparkle of glittering lights that poured out from two pencil-like cylinders embedded in the pillar, one on each side of the box.
Within the box was a golden marble.
"I know," I said dizzily. "It'll grant me three wishes."
"That type of humor is a defense mechanism against fear," Belem told me unsympathetically. "Here is the main reason why I chose the difficult and dangerous method of entering your mind. No men of this age would have gone with me this far. They're all conditioned against Mechandroids.
"You were the only one who could and would have got into the Subterrane. In that transparent box is, I think, the only weapon against which we have no defense at all. As long as it's within the field of radiation, as it is now, it's harmless. Remove it and, within two minutes, it, becomes activated."
"What is it?"
"A complicated pattern of energies. It's positively charged now. When it's activated, it becomes negatively charged. Then it creates a dead field for nearly a mile around it, in which no matter-transmitters will operate."
"That doesn't seem so dangerous. You can get along without matter-transmitters long enough to walk a mile, can't you?"