He ran as fast as he could, aware that if he took the track that moved slowly downward, her shouts might alarm someone on a lower level who could intercept him.
And so he dodged and ran up the stationary track that led to the twenty-first level. Once before he had explored up there. The silence of the rooms had awed him, had frightened him so that he had hurried back down, but on this day the silent rooms were refuge.
Higher and higher. The twenty-first level did not seem safe enough. He continued on up to the next level above that and collapsed, his mouth dry, a great pain in his side, his heart thudding. He listened above the sound of his heart and the stillness settled around him.
It was then he had noticed, close to his left hand, the edge of the great wheel that moved the track. It was like the wheels at the lower levels, with the one astounding difference — it was stilled.
Raul touched it gently. An odd new thought began to form itself in his mind. This might be a thing that was... broken. That had ceased to run. The thought dizzied him because it was outside his experience. All things ran — that is, all things designed to run did so, quietly, perfectly and forever. He had known of the tracks that were still above the twentieth level, and had thought that it was meant that they should be that way. And now he was confounded by this new concept of “brokenness.” One of the women had broken an arm. She was shunned because it was now a crooked misshapen thing. He knew that he dared not talk of this new concept as it applied to the tracks above the twentieth level. Such a thought if expressed would be heresy, pure and simple.
It was hard to think in such a fashion. It made an ache deep in his head. If this track had ceased, for some reason, to run — then it followed that these upper levels were to be used by all the Watchers — and were shunned now merely because of the physical difficulty of walking up the steep slopes. He knew of no one, adult or child, who had gone higher than the twentieth level. There was no need for it. On the lower levels were the warm perfumed baths, the places of wine and of sleep and of the taste of honey. On the lower levels were the food rooms and the rooms that healed pain.
He suddenly wondered how high the levels stretched above him. Would it be possible to go to the top? But was there a top? Was there an end to it? Or did the levels go on and on, higher and higher, without ever an end to them. The strength of his desire for an answer to this question shocked him. He could taste the shrillness of fear in his throat, but at the same time excitement fluttered inside him with soft frantic wings.
He was dressed, as were all the children, in the single long strip of soft metal fabric. It was wound around the waist, with the trailing end brought up between the legs and tucked firmly inside the waistband. When one was old enough to be permitted to dream, one was given either the toga and thongs of a man, or the robe of a woman. When death came, when the dead one was slipped, naked, into the mouth of the oval tube to speed down into unknown blackness, the clothing was saved. He had seen the room where it was stored in shining piles that reached to the highest point a man could touch.
He stood up, took a deep breath, tightened the hand at his waist and walked solemnly up the next motionless track. And the next, and the next. He tired of the steep climb and rested, realizing that he had lost count. The corridors down which he glanced had a sameness about them, and a silence.
At last he came to a track which moved upwards, its neighboring track moving downward, silently and perfectly. He stepped onto the track which carried him up, wondering how long it had been since other bare feet had stopped there.
Up and up and up. The familiar things were a frightening distance below him. But fears were lulled by the familiar silent motion of the track, which created a wind to touch his face.
With the sudden shock of a blow, he saw that at last there was no track to carry him higher, and thus no level above the one he had reached. The corridor was smaller than the others. He fought against a fear that commanded him to turn quickly and descend. The silence was the worst. No pad of feet against the body-warm floors. No distant voices. No sound of children. Just silence and the glow of the walls.
This, then, was the top of the world, the top of eternity, the summit of all. Fear faded into exaltation and he felt larger than life itself. He, Raul Kinson, had gone, alone, to the top of the world. The sneer at the others formed in his mind. He stuck his chest out and carried his chin high. The old ones said there was no limit to the world — that the silent levels went upward into infinity, that those who slid down the tube of death fell forever, turning slowly through the blackness, until the end of time.
He walked down the corridor. It curved slightly. He stopped. There was a picture, a large picture, at the end of the corridor. He knew of pictures. There were thousands of them on the eighteenth level and no one really understood them.
He walked to the picture with the contempt of familiarity. He walked close to its oddly shining surface. A low sound bubbled in his throat, the darkness rushed over him and he had no feeling of impact as he fell.
He struggled back to consciousness and knelt and looked at the picture again. He knew that it was no picture. It was a revelation. It was a truth so fantastic that he heard, on his lips, the meaningless sounds that infants make. He knew that from this day forward, he would be apart from all the others who had not seen this, who did not share his concept.
Outside of the levels, beyond the walls that glowed, everyone was taught that there was nothingness. Often he had gone to sleep trying to visualize “nothingness.” It was all a lie.
All of the levels were located in an enormous, frightening room. The ceiling, impossibly high, was a deep purple color, with hard shining dots of light in it, and one enormous round deep-red light that hurt his eyes when he looked directly at it. The floor of the room was tan and brown and gray. The most horrible aspect of the enormous room was his inability to see the walls. They were beyond vision, in itself a new concept. It dizzied him to stare down at the remote floor. Far off, to the right, the floor was humped up into a jagged series of mounds much higher than the level of his eye. And, in the foreground, six objects towered, standing neatly in a row. The glow of the round red light made them look silvery. The longer he stared, the more accustomed he became to perspective and the more accurately he could assess the height of those six cylindrical featureless objects with the blunt snouts and the flared portion that rested against the tan of the floor. As he watched he saw movement. A bit of the floor came alive, lifted up into a tall whirling column. He could not understand why it did this thing. He watched it move, still whirling, toward the high rough mounds. Soon he could see it no more. He touched his mouth to the hard surface of the transparent substance and drew back with startled speed. In a world where everything was warmed, the surface had a strange chill.
The gnawing of hunger at last took him away from the picture which he later found was called a “window.” He went all the way back down to the deep familiar levels. He spoke to no one of what he had seen. He walked in a daze, feeling shrunken and small against the enormities of what lay outside the known world. He ate and slept and bathed and walked alone, seeking always the chance to slip away, to return to his window that looked out on another world which dwarfed his own.
Once, full of the importance of new knowledge, he had tried to tell one of the old ones about what he had seen. Wrath exploded and Raul Kinson picked himself up off the floor, with bleeding mouth, determined to speak no more.