The Time Axis

human. An image of metal would stand like that, not seeming to breathe, no tiniest random motion stirring it. And I had an instant's uncanny recollection that the De Kalb I knew had moved with curious clumsiness, like an automaton.

Then the metal eyes moved.

No, I moved.

It was a fall, in a way. But no fall I could accurately describe. It was motion of abnormal motor impulses, fantastic simply because they were without precedent. One walks, actually, in a succession of forward-falling movements, the legs automatically swinging forward to save one from collapse toward the center of gravity.

This was reaction to a sort of warped gravitational pull that drew me toward De Kalb. It was the opposite of paralysis – a new gravitation had appeared and I was falling toward it. It was like rushing down a steep slope, unable to halt oneself.

His strange, smooth face was expressionless but the metal eyes moved, watching me, reflecting my twin images that grew larger and larger as I fell upon him down a vertiginous abyss. The eyes came toward me with an effect of terrible hypnosis, probing into mine, stabbing through the reflection of my own face, my own eyes, and pinning the brain in my skull – probing into my mind and the little chamber behind the mind, where the ego lives.

Then he was looking out – through my own eyes! Deep in my brain the metal gaze crouched, looking watchfully outward, seeing what I saw.

A telepathic rapport? I couldn't explain it. All I knew was the fact. De Kalb was a spy in my brain now.

I turned around. I went back toward the door into the transmission room. I closed the door. I was alone there. But the metal eyes looked at the room as I looked at it. I had no control over my motions while I saw my own hand rise and finger the wall. But when the room began to shimmer and the disorientation of matter- transmission shivered through my body I knew I had my muscles and my will back again. I was free to move as I liked. I was free to think and speak. But not about what had just happened. It may have been something like post-hypnotic command, to give it a label. That's easy for me. Remember, I'd looked into De Kalb's quicksilver eyes.

All this happened in something under thirty seconds. I've given you, of course, conclusions and afterthoughts that came to me much later, when I had time to think over what I'd seen and correlate it. But I woke in the rusted room, I looked out into a city on a planet outside our solar system, I saw something like an autopsy in a vast laboratory braced as if to withstand unearthly pressures, I met the gaze of Ira De Kalb and then the thing had happened between us – happened. And I returned to the transmitter.

The room vibrated and vanished.

12. THE SWAN GARDEN

Topaz squealed with sheer delight.

'Come on out!' she cried. 'It's the Swan Garden! What are you waiting for anyhow? I'll take back all I ever said about Lord Paynter. Oh, do look, isn't it wonderful here?'

Silently I stepped after her through the door.

So little actual time had elapsed that I don't think she really missed me. Something had reached out through the matter-transmitter and intercepted one of us and let the other go on. But Topaz must have rushed out of the door the moment it opened and been too overcome with pleasure at finding herself just here to realize I was lagging behind.

And I – had I really been for a round-trip through a galaxy? Had I dreamed it? Was this whole interlude a dream while my own body slept in the time-axis, waiting for the world's end? In preparation for that sleep I had begun to learn how to ignore time as a factor in our plans.

In this world, waking or sleeping, evidently I must learn to ignore space. Distance meant nothing here with the matter-transmitters functioning as they did. You could live on Centaurus and get your breakfast rolls fresh from a bakery in Chicago.

You could drop in on a friend on Sirius to borrow a book, simply because it might be easier than to walk around the corner for one. And in the annihilation of space, time too seemed to undergo a certain annihilation. Just as, in ignoring time, you could as a corollary overstep space.

I had overstepped reason too. I had come into a world where nothing made sense to me, where the people who had been my companions moved behind masks, stirred by motives that were gibberish. I had overstepped both space and time just now, and so compactly that the girl who called herself Topaz never missed me.

I was still too dazed to argue. I could control my own motions again but my mind had suffered too much bewilderment to function very well. I followed Topaz dumbly, staring about me at the remarkable landscape of the Swan Garden – knowing in some indescribable way that inside my mind other eyes stared too, impassive metal eyes that watched my thoughts as they watched the things around me.

Topaz spun around twice in sheer delight, her sun-colored veils flying. Then she ran her hands through her hair, dislodging a last sparkle or two, and, smiling at me over her shoulder, beckoned and hurried ahead through what seemed to be a wall of white lace.

A gentle breeze stirred it, shivering the folds together and I saw that we were following a narrow path through a grove of head-high growths like palmetto, except that the leaves and flowers were white, and shaped like enormous snow-flakes, each a perfect crystalline pattern and every one different from every other.

Topaz ran her hands lovingly through the flowers as we went down the path. Underfoot the ground had the look and feel of soft down. After a moment we entered a cleared space with what seemed at first glance a stream of water tracing an arabesque path among huge, humped boulders. The breeze freshened, the lacy curtains shimmered and thinned before it and I saw a gossamer vista beyond of unreal gardens where fantastic beauties lay in wait.

'Sit down,' Topaz said. 'I don't know why Lord Paynter sent us here but I suppose he'll join us when he's ready. Isn't it lovely? Now I can have my hair starred again. Oh, do sit down! Right there, on that – '

'That rock?' I asked.

'No, that chair. Look.' She sank lightly on one of the boulders and it curved and moulded itself beneath her to a couch the shape of her body, fitting every bend of her limbs perfectly. It looked very comfortable.

I grinned at her and sat down myself, feeling thick, resilent softness yielding as I sank. Deliberately I turned off my mind. Events wholly beyond my control had catapulted me into this world and this complex situation.

The only way I could keep sane was to ride along without a struggle until the time for action came. I thought I'd know it when it did. There was no use asking questions of this lovely deliberately feather-brained little creature beside me. Perhaps, when Paynter came –

'Have some fruit,' Topaz invited, gesturing at the stream flowing past.

I looked again. It wasn't a stream. Call it a tube, of flowing crystal, hanging unsupported in the air about three feet off the ground. It came out of the downy earth at the edge of the trees, twisted intricately around the boulders and dived into the ground again farther on. From where I sat I could touch one arch of it without stretching.

Drifting past my hand came a globe, large as an orange, of a pale green translucence. Topaz put out her hand, waited for it to drift nearer, plucked it out of the stream. She gave it to me, cool and dripping from its bath.

'Eat it if you like,' she said. 'Choose what you will. I'm going away for awhile. Oh, I've been so good to you! Hours and hours I sat waiting for them to wake you up and my hair grew all dull and horrible.' She shook her curls and her face brightened.