His eyes went back to Dopelle. There, just above Dopelle’s head, hung Mekky, the basketball-sized sphere that was a mechanical brain.
Inside his head came Mekky’s voice. «It could be, Keith Winton. Something about a potentiomotor. A man named Burton. Whatever it is, it’s not known here. Do you know the details, the wiring diagram?
«Don’t bother answering, just think. Yes, you’ve seen diagram and formula. You don’t know them consciously but they’re there in your subconscious. I think I can get to them under light hypnosis. You are willing?»
«Yes, of course,» Keith said. «What’s the score?»
«The score is this,» said Dopelle, answering for Mekky. «The Arcs are going to attack soon. We don’t know exactly when but it may be within hours. And they’ve got something new. We don’t know how to buck it yet. It’s a single ship, not a fleet—but their whole effort for years has gone into it. That’s good, in one way. If we can destroy it the way will be clear for us to take the fleet to Arcturus and end the war. But—»
«But what?» Keith asked. «Is it too big for you to handle?»
Dopelle waved a hand impatiently. «Size doesn’t matter, although it’s really a monster—ten thousand feet, ten times the biggest thing we’ve ever tried to build. But it’s coated with a new metal, impervious to anything we know. We can A-bomb it all day and not scratch the finish.»
Keith nodded. «We had that stuff, too—in our science-fiction magazines.» He got the space-suit off as he finished speaking. «I used to edit one.»
Dopelle’s face lighted up. It was a nice face. Keith decided that—Betty Hadley regardless—he liked Dopelle. «I used to read them,» Dopelle said, «when I was younger. Of course now—»
But something in the expression on Dopelle’s face registered. He’d seen a face like it before, back—no, he hadn’t seen the face, either. Just a photograph of it. A photograph of a younger and far less handsome edition. Dopelle was—
«Joe Doppelberg!» Keith said. His mouth fell open.
«What?» Dopelle’s eyes were puzzled now. «What do you mean?»
«I know you now,» Keith said. «I’ve got a clue to this set-up. You’re Joe Doppelberg, a science-fiction fan of—of back there where I came from. Only you’re older than he—and a thousand times handsomer and more intelligent than he and—you’ve got everything he wanted.
«You’re what he would have dreamed himself to be. He—you—used to write me long letters, full of corny humor, to my Rocketalk Department, and you called me Rocky and you didn’t like our Bems, and—»
He broke off and his mouth dropped open again.
Dopelle said, «Mekky, he’s crazy. You won’t get anything out of him. He’s stark crazy.»
«No,» Mekky’s voice said. «He isn’t crazy. He’s wrong of course but he isn’t crazy. I can follow his thought processes and see why he thinks that. I can straighten him out on it. I see the whole thing now—except the formula and diagram we need.
«Come, Keith Winton, you must go under light hypnosis so I can get from your deep subconscious what I need. Then I’ll tell you everything you want to know.»
«How to get back?»
«Possibly. I’m not sure of that. But you will be doing a tremendous service. You may be the instrument of saving Earth from Arcturus—and Earth here is just as real as the one you know. You’re not living in the dream of one of your science-fiction fans. I assure you of that.
«And that you may know what you’re saving Earth from would you care to see an Arcturian?»
«Would I—why sure. Why not?»
«Follow.»
The sphere that was Mekky floated across the room, and Keith followed. The voice was saying inside his head, «This is one we captured in a scouting ship. The first we captured alive since the early days of the war. It was from its mind—if you can call it a mind—that I learned of the monster ship that is to come, and of the new armament it will have. After you see it—»
A door swung open, revealing a steel-barred door just inside it and a cell beyond the steel bars. A light flashed on within the cell.
«That,» said the voice of Mekky, «is an Arcturian.»
Keith stepped closer to look through the bars and then he stepped back even more quickly. He felt as though he were going to be sick at his stomach. He closed his eyes and swayed dizzily. Horror and nausea almost blanked him out.
The steel door swung shut.
«That,» said Mekky, «is an Arcturian in its own body. Maybe now you understand why Arcturian spies are shot on suspicion.» Keith cleared his throat. «Yes,» he said. «That is what will destroy the human race and populate the Solar System, unless we can destroy the monster ship. And time is short. Come, Keith Winton.»
CHAPTER XV
Flashback
KEITH WINTON FELT a little dazed.
He felt as though he’d been drunk and were just sobering up, as though he’d been under ether and were just coming out. Yet it wasn’t quite like that either. Though he felt physically lethargic his mind was clear, crystalline in fact. It was just that too much strong meat was being fed to it all at once. It was having difficulty absorbing more.
He sat on a little steel-railed balcony, looking out over the big room of Dopelle’s space-ship, watching Dopelle and a varying number of other workmen swiftly and efficiently making something that looked like a very large and quite modified edition of something he’d seen a picture of in a science magazine back on Earth, his own Earth. It was a Burton potentiomotor.
The sphere that was Mekky floated above the operation, fifty feet away from Keith, but it was talking to Keith, in Keith’s mind. Distance didn’t make any difference, it seemed, to Mekky. And Keith had a hunch that Mekky was carrying on more than one of those telepathic conversations at the same time, that Mekky was directing Dopelle and the workmen even while he talked to Keith.
«You find it difficult to grasp, of course,» Mekky’s voice was saying. «Infinity is, in fact, impossible fully to grasp. Yet there are infinite universes.»
«But where?» Keith’s mind asked. «In parallel dimensions or what?»
«Dimension is merely an attribute of a universe,» Mekky said, «having validity only within that particular universe. From otherwhere a universe—spatially infinite in itself—is but a point.
«There are an infinite number of points on the head of a pin. There are as many points on the head of a pin as in an infinite universe or an infinity of infinite universes. And infinity to the infinite power is still only infinity.
«There are, then, an infinite number of co-existent universes—including the one you came from and this one. But do you conceive what infinity means, Keith Winton?»
«Well—yes and no.»
«It means that, out of infinity, all conceivable universes exist. There is, for instance, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you—or the equivalent of you—are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones.
«There are an infinite number of permutations of that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger and one in which you have a dull headache and—»
«But they are all me?»
«No, none of them is you. I should not have used that pronoun. They are separate individual entities—just as the Keith Winton of this universe is a separate entity from you. In this particular variation, there is a wide physical difference—no resemblance, in fact.