Страница 10 из 81
CHAPTER 7
For long minutes I sat on the couch unmoving, my body numb with shock, my mind spi
You wiped out my race… your people killed mine… and I will avenge my race by destroying yours — and your masters as well.
It couldn’t be true. And what did he mean by his talk of the two of us moving on different time tracks, of having met before? Your masters? What did he mean by that? Ormazd? But he said masters, plural. Is Ormazd the representative of a different race, an alien race from another world that controls all of humankind? Just as Ahriman is the last survivor of an alien race that we humans battled so long ago?
How many times had we met before? Ahriman said that this point in time, this first test of the fusion reactor, marked a nexus tor the human race. If it succeeds, we will use fusion energy to reach out to the stars. If it fails, we will kill ourselves within a generation. There must have been other nexuses back through time, many of them.
Somewhere back along those eons there was a war, The War, between the human race and Ahriman’s kind. When? Why? How could we fight invaders from another world back in the past, thousands of years ago?
All these thoughts were bubbling through my brain until finally my body asserted itself on my conscious awareness.
“It’s getting hot in here,” I said aloud.
My attention snapped to the present. To this tiny cell. The air was hot and dry. My throat felt raw. The room was now hot enough to make me sweat.
I got up and felt the nearest wall. It was almost too hot to touch. And although it looked like wood paneling, it felt like stone. It was an illusion, all of it.
One small step for a man… if he truly understands the way the universe is constructed.
I understood nothing. I could remember nothing. All I could think of was that Ahriman was back on Earth’s surface, up in A
You are only a step away from the house in A
“One small step for a man,” I muttered to myself. How is the universe constructed? It’s made of atoms. And atoms are made of smaller particles, tiny bits of frozen energy that can be made to thaw and flow and surge…
This room had been created by warping the energies of the atoms in the Earth’s crust. Those energies were now reverting back to their natural form; slowly the room was turning back into hot, viscous rock. I could feel the air congealing, becoming hotter and thicker by the second. I would be imbedded in rock thirty miles below the surface, rock hot enough to be almost molten.
Yet I was only a step from safety, according to Ahriman. Was he lying? No, he couldn’t have been. He had walked directly through the rock wall of this room. He must have returned to the cellar of the house inA
I already had!I had stepped from the cellar into this underground dungeon. Why couldn’t I step back again?
I tried doing it and got nothing but bumps against solid rock for my efforts. There was more to it than simply trying it.
But wait. If I had truly traveled thirty miles through solid rock in a single step, it must mean that there is a co
I sat on the couch again, my mind racing. I had read magazine articles about space warps, speculations about how someday starships would be able to fly thousands of lightyears almost instantaneously. Astrophysicists had discovered “black holes” in interstellar space that warped space-time with their titanic gravitational fields. It was all a matter of geometry, a pattern, like taking a flat sheet of paper and folding it into the form of a bird or a flower.
And I had seen that pattern! I had gone through it on my way into this chamber. But it had happened so quickly that I could not consciously remember it in detail.
Or could I?
Data compression. Satellites in orbit can accumulate data on magnetic tapes for days on end, and then spurt it all down to a receiving station on the ground within a few seconds. The compressed data is then played at a much slower speed by the technicians, and all the many days’ worth of information is intact and readable.
Could I slow down my memory to the point where I could recall, miscrosecond by microsecond, what had happened to me during that one brief stride from the house to this underground tomb? I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes. It was getting more and more difficult to breathe, but I tried to ignore the burning in my chest and concentrate on remembering.
A thirty-mile stride. A step through solid rock. I pictured myself in the cellar of that house. I had ducked under a heating pipe and stepped into darkness…
And cold. The first instant of my step I had felt a wave of intense cold, as if I had passed through a curtain of liquefied air. Cryogenic cold. Cold so intense that atoms are frozen almost motionless, at nearly absolute zero temperature.
In those few microseconds of unbearable cold I saw that the crystal structure of the atoms around me had indeed been frozen, almost entirely stilled. All around me the atoms glowed dully like pinpoints of jeweled lights, faint and sullen because nearly all their energies had been leached away from them. The crystal latticework of the atoms had formed a path for me, a tu
I opened my eyes. The tiny room was glowing now; the air itself seemed afire. I held my breath, wondering how long my body could function on the oxygen stored within its cells and in my blood.
I understood how I had gotten here. There was a crystal latticework of energy co
How to find the opening into that tu
My brain could not… Wrong! I realized that I had so far been using only half my brain to attack the problem. I remembered Ormazd telling me that I could consciously employ both hemispheres simultaneously, something that ordinary human beings ca
With a conscious effort I forced the other hemisphere of my brain to consider the problem. I could almost hear myself laugh inside my head as the unused portion of my mind said something like, “Well, it’s about time.”
And it was about time. The solution to the problem of finding the gateway to the crystal latticework of atoms was a matter of timing. All those dully glowing atoms were still vibrating slowly, u