'We have gathered here,' said the thought-waves, 'to consider ways and means of meeting one of the greatest dangers…”
Just like a political speaker back on Earth, thought Gary. He tried to make out which one of the Engineers was talking, but there was no facial expression, no movement of any sort which would determine which one of them the speaker might be. He tried to pick out Engineer 1824, but all the Engineers looked exactly alike.
The talk rumbled on, a smooth roll of thought explaining the situation that they faced, the many problems it presented, the need of acting at once.
Gary studied the other things about them, the loathsome, unnatural things that had been brought here from the unguessed depths of the universe. He shuddered and felt cold beads of sweat break out upon his body as he looked at them.
Several of them were immersed in tanks filled with liquids. One tank boiled and steamed as if with violent chemical action; another was cloudy and dirty-looking; another was clear as water and in it lurked a thing that struck stark terror into Gary's soul. Another was confined in a huge glass sphere through which shifted and swirled a poisonous-appearing atmosphere.
Gary felt cold fingers touch his spine as he watched the sphere and suddenly was thankful for the shifting mists within it, for through them he had caught sight of something that he was certain would have shattered one's mind to look upon without the shielding swirl of fog within the glass.
In a small glass cage set upon a pedestal of stone were several writhing, grub-like things that palpitated disgustingly. Squatting on its haunches directly across from Gary was a monstrosity with mottled skin and drooling mouth, with narrow, slitted eyes and slimy features. He fastened his pinpoint gaze upon the Earthman and Gary quickly looked away.
Nothing resembled mankind, nothing except the Engineers. Here were things that were terrible caricatures of the loathsome forms of Earth life, other beings that bore not even the most remote resemblance to anything that mankind had ever seen or imagined.
Was this a fair sample of the intelligence the universe contained? Did he and Kingsley and Caroline appear as disgusting, as fearsome in the eyes as these other denizens of the universe as they appeared to his?
He shot a quick glance at Caroline. She was listening intently, her chin cupped in one hand, her eyes upon the Engineers. Just as well that way, he thought. She didn't see these other things.
The Engineer had stopped talking and silence fell upon the room. Then a new impulse of thought beat against Gary's brain, thought that seemed cold and cruel, thought that was entirely mechanistic and consciousless. He glanced swiftly around, trying to find who was speaking. It must, he decided, be the thing in the glass sphere. He could not understand the thought, grasped just vague impressions of atomic structures and mathematics that seemed to represent enormous pressure used to control surging energy.
The Engineer was talking again.
'Such a solution,' he was saying, 'would be possible on a planet such as yours, where an atmosphere many miles in depth, composed of heavy gases, creates the pressures that you speak of. While we can create such pressures artificially, we could not create or maintain them outside the laboratory.”
'What the hell,' asked Herb, 'are they arguing about?”
'Shut up,' hissed Gary, and the photographer lapsed into shamefaced silence.
The cold, cruel thought was arguing, trying to explain a point that Gary could only guess at. He looked at Caroline, wondering if she understood.
Her face was twisted into tiny lines of concentration.
The cold stream of thought had stopped and another thought broke in, a little piping thought. Perhaps, thought Gary, one of the little slug-like creatures in the glass cage.
Disgusting little things!
Gary looked at the mottled, droopy-eyed creature that squatted opposite him. It raised its head and in the beady eyes he imagined that he caught a glimmer of amusement.
'By the Lord,' he said to himself, 'he thinks it's funny, too.”
This arguing of hideous entities! The piping thoughts of slimy things that should be wriggling through some stagnant roadside ditch back on the planet Earth. The cold thought of the brain-blasting thing that lived on a planet covered by miles of swirling gases. The pinpoint eyes of the being with the mottled skin.
Cosmic Crusade! He laughed to himself, deep in his throat. This wasn't the way he had imagined it. He had thought of gleaming ships of war, of stabbing rays, of might arrayed against might, a place where courage would be at a premium.
But there was nothing to fight. No physical thing. Nothing a man could get at. Another universe, a mighty thing of curving space and time… that was the enemy. A man simply couldn't do anything about a thing like that.
'This place,' Herb whispered to him, 'is giving me the creeps.”
Chapter Nine
'We can do it,' said Caroline. She flicked a pencil against a sheet of calculations. 'This proves it,' she declared.
Kingsley bent over her shoulder to look at the sheet. 'If you don't mind,”
he said, 'would you lead me through it all again. Go slowly, please. I find it hard to grasp a lot of it.”
'Kingsley,' said Herb, 'you're just an amateur. To get as good as she is you'd have to think for forty lifetimes.”
'You embarrass me,' she said. 'It's very simple. It's really very simple.”
'I'll say it's simple,' said Tommy. 'Just a little matter of bending space and time into a tiny universe. Wrapping it about a selected bit of matter and making it stay put.”
'You could use it to control the energy,' rumbled Kingsley. 'I understand that well enough. When the universes begin to rub you could trap the incoming energy in an artificial universe. The energy would destroy that universe, but you'd have another ready for it. What I can't understand is how you form this artificial fourth- dimensional space.”
'It isn't artificial,' snapped Gary. 'It's real… as real as the universe we live in. But it's made by human beings instead of by some law we have no inkling of.”
He pointed at the sheet of calculations. 'Perhaps the secret of all the universe is on that sheet of paper,' he declared. 'Maybe that's the key to how the universe was formed.”
'Maybe,' rumbled Kingsley, 'and maybe not. There may be many ways to do it.”
'One,' said Gary, 'is good enough for me.”
'There's just one thing,' said Caroline, 'that bothers me. We don't know anything about the fifth-dimensional inter-space. We can imagine that its laws are different from our own. Vastly different. But how do they differ?
What kind of energy would be formed out there? What form would it take?”
She looked from one to the other of them. 'That would make a lot of difference,' she declared.
'It would,' agreed Kingsley. 'It would make a lot of difference. It would be like setting a trap for some animal. You might set one for a rat and catch a bear… or the other way around.”
'The Hellhounds know,' said Tommy. 'They know how to navigate in the inter-space.”
'But they wouldn't tell us,' said Gary. 'They don't want the universe to be saved. They want it to be wrecked so they can build a new world out of the wreckage.”
'It might be light, or matter, or heat, or motion, or it might be something that's entirely different,' said Caroline. 'It's not impossible it would be something else, some new fearful form of energy with which we are entirely unacquainted. Conditions would be just as different out in inter-space as fourth-dimensional conditions differ from our three-dimensional world.”
'And to be able to control it we would have to have some idea as to what it is,' said Kingsley.
'Or what it would become when it entered the hyperspace,' said Gary. 'It might be one kind of energy out there, an entirely different kind when it entered our universe.”
'The people of the other universe don't seem to know,' Tommy pointed out.
