A fiery burning flared out around us and died instantly and the creature flashed into clear outline. Outline only, for it had no features and never did have, only the vague likeness to humanity it had drawn from the minds of its human hosts. Perhaps it was my own will, perhaps the will of the godlike hand that wielded me, that made me close with that solid shadow.
Where and how I gripped it I do not know. Perhaps I never really touched it at all. Perhaps it was merely will against will. All I could feel now was a furious deadly pressure against which I must exert the utmost of my strength in a direction I could not understand. Mental energy, pure will, perhaps simply the maintenance of temporal reality – how does the chisel know what force it exerts?
Somewhere I felt the enemy give back – not at any point where I met him. He weakened briefly far off in – space-time? How can I even guess? Perhaps we were hemming him in all around, temporally as well as physically, for some other human tool, De Kalb or Paynter, Letta Essen or Belem – had cut deeply into the resisting substance that was the nekronic universe.
The dark was a flashing, coruscating whirl of suns that blazed white. Tracks of fire burned in curves as stars rolled across that white vault. I knew how swiftly I must be moving in time.
With a jolt I was halted, pressed back. The blind, featureless face of the Adversary loomed larger, blotting out half the white heavens. Back and back I fell –
And then suddenly there was support all around me, a merging of familiar minds with mine. It was deeper than the nearness I had felt before. We were drawn together, we four. Our minds touched and blended and became a single larger entity, a whole that yet preserved the individuality of us all. The cold clear thoughts of Belem and De Kalb lighted my mind like the facets of brilliance shot from a diamond. The blind white-hot violence of Murray and Paynter, the infinite resource that was Topaz and Letta Essen.
Now the Adversary shifted its grip. I felt it give a little before our combined pressure. And we seemed to be viewing it from several points at once – in
I knew the answer very clearly, in one flash.
We were the chosen weapons, the doubly sharpened blade. That was why my own body and the bodies of the rest had crumbled into dust when the time-axis chamber was shattered. Two identical matrices can not exist in the same space-time, but two identical matrices had been necessary to forge this weapon that was ourselves.
No mind fixed and conditioned to one sector in time could pin down the nekron. It took a larger concept, a binocular view from two points in time. And the Face of Ea had doubled our striking power when it doubled our minds in bodies that were basically identical with the ones we wore when we were born.
We had fought this battle before in miniature. In the world of the middle future we had been tempered to this final task. The nekron was fixed and trapped here – it could no longer evade us through time. Our strangely multiple mind could fix and focus upon it.
But the battle was yet to come.
With reckless, single-minded violence that multiple mind smashed out at the nekronic Adversary. As Paynter had driven the metal ram no harder than he drove himself against the fortress barrier, as Harrison Murray had so often hurled himself in stubborn, blind fury against foes tangible and' intangible – so the weapon that was ourselves crashed against the black nekronic force striving to destroy us.
Somehow, somewhere, in some hidden weakness of ourselves, it sought and found a flaw. It drove us back. Its own incredible power smashed through warping channels of space and time at our welded minds.
If a single one of those inconceivable bolts of destruction had struck us it might have been the finish for us all. But none struck. For Topaz was part of the weapon which was ourselves and all Topaz's memories of infinite cleverness, infinitely adaptable life – with Letta Essen's cool, watchful mind to guide her.
Oh, Topaz was adaptable – that had been her purpose and her goal in society. She had incredible mental, emotional, muscular control and she reached instinctively, automatically to any outside threat. Now I saw her talents' ultimate extension as – somehow, in a black star-blazing gulf that yet embodied the whole universe – we dodged and whirled and shifted so that none of those nekronic assaults quite smashed home.
Then, abruptly, we were falling. There was neither up nor down, but a frightful, abysmal vertigo that sucked us with impossible acceleration into the deeps below the universe itself. We were drawn into the black nighted heart of the nekron – its soul and center – and life itself receded to a point of infinity and was shut wholly out, away from us. If we had size it must have changed. If we had warmth and life it must have frozen instantly in all minds. In its last defense the nekron itself absorbed us.
25. RETURN VOYAGE
Luckily I cannot remember that last horror very clearly.
It was I who saved us from that.
This was my purpose. It was the plan from the beginning. That was why I had been allowed from the start to keep my own memories intact. For I was the anchor man at the end of the chain, the solid rock and the lifeline extending beyond the shore of sanity and logic and the monstrous, non-matter maelstrom engulfing the others.
They had needed their double minds to meet and fight the nekron, to carry the battle to its own grounds. But my purpose was to anchor the line. I could feel them losing touch with all familiar things, feel the dark destroying silence of the nekron closing them in.
It closed about me too but not completely. It could not shut out my memories. I had a singleness of mind that made a chain too strong to snap. I remembered my own world, my own time, with a clarity unimpaired by double memories. All the small things that are changeless realities came back to me in one strong pouring tide.
The little things that mean nothing alone – things like firelight moving on the walls of an old room, the smell of freshly-cut grass at twilight, the sharp fragrance of printer's ink, the heart-shaking thunder of a flight of planes moving in formation overhead, the taste of cold sweet spring-water gushing from a mountainside.
I remembered Earth.
So I woke them out of the dead emptiness of the nekron's heart. Their minds clung to mine and mine clung to the lifeline of my own world, my own time, my own indestructible memories.
Last of all De Kalb struck – with Belem's mind locked into his.
We were in the nekron's heart now. We had been admitted to its most vulnerable spot. Once before Belem had done something very like this – when he joined his mind with mine and summoned the nekronic killer to defeat Paynter's men.
Now in the nekron's very citadel, its innermost heart – he gripped our minds closer together. He forced them until they were one indeed.
He opened that gigantic ultimate mind to the nekron!
Two of the finest brains of two cultures guided us then – Belem, inhuman, emotionless, machine-bred, half-human – and De Kalb, with all his brilliance and his humanity balancing Belem's cold logic. Behind these two- in-one, the rest of us – a single unit now.
Paynter and Murray – hammer and anvil!
Topaz and Letta Essen – incomparably resourceful, evading the counter-attack.
I with my single mind, holding fast to the solidity of the normal universe, standing like a wall behind the others, holding open the gates in that wall through which we had come, through which the power of the Face of Ea poured to help us.
The power of the nekron flowed through us, channeled by Belem and De Kalb. It emptied, drained like a falling ocean into us. But we were not vulnerable, now. It could not – feed – upon us.
