The Time Axis

People from colonies all over the Galaxy must have changed stations here. I know I attracted no attention as I hurried through the cosmopolitan crowd toward a row of transmission rooms in the center of the concourse, closed the door behind me, manipulated more buttons.

It was curious, I thought to myself as the familiar disorientation swam through my brain, how little I was seeing of this marvelous world of the middle future. Topaz had assured me that cities were obsolete and mankind lived in luxurious isolation wherever his fancy dictated.

Yet all I had seen so far, except for the Swan Garden, had been the underpi

The room steadied about me. The door slid open.

I looked down a long corridor bathed in white light.

“This is the Subterrane,” Belem’s voice in my brain said.

17. The World of Belem

Had I been expecting something semi-miraculous I should have been disappointed. I had seen similar passages under Grand Central Station. Here there was nothing at all unusual—simply a white corridor, empty and silent.

“In your day,” the Mechandroid told me, “this would have been a grouping of thick doors and locks. The Subterrane is the arsenal of the government. It isn’t on Earth. Walk forward.”

I obeyed. I felt a brief tingling, a rather pleasant vibration that passed and was gone.

“You have just passed between a cathode and anode that would have disrupted the brain of any Mechandroid. The pattern is keyed so that it’s harmless to humans. No Mechandroid has ever been permitted in the Subterrane—till now.”

So they were vulnerable after all.

“Why, yes,” Belem remarked, surprised. “Every existing thing is capable of negation—of altering its condition to non-existence. The less adaptable an organism, the easier it is to destroy. But this cathode-anode device is not portable and its field is quite limited.

“It is useful only for defense—not for offense. You would be destroyed, too, if you hurled yourself on a sharpened stake. The other devices are aimed at human beings who aren’t wearing the protective helmets. Luckily—”

I wasn’t in a corridor any more. Not a normal corridor. Planar geometry had suddenly and empirically been disproved. My eyes, conditioned to normal perspective, went dizzily out of focus as abruptly as gravity itself seemed to alter.

You can’t describe the indescribable. Lines of perspective meet at the vanishing point—sure. So they say. But the walls and floor and ceiling of the white-lit tu

There was no corridor. There was only white emptiness. Dead white and featureless except for the cone that pointed accusingly at me. I tried to move forward and a horrible, sick, giddiness loosened my muscles and then tightened them again as I strained to stand rigid. As long as I didn’t move an inch I might not fall.

“Walk forward!” the voice in my mind insisted. I shut my eyes and walked forward. At Belem’s a

“I can’t do this too often without resting,” Belem said. “Open your mind. Relax. Let me control your muscles. This illusion is for human eyes only. I can screen it out and see the right way.”

It took tremendous effort on my part to keep my eyes open and my muscles relaxed. That disgusting falling sensation kept growing stronger and every sane instinct I had reacted violently at what my optic nerves described. I was walking into a vanishing point—that was the only way to describe it. I walked right into the point of the white cone and through it—don’t ask me how, because it was an illusion—and then I was in the white corridor again.

I took ten unsteady steps, and came out into a wider tu

There were hieroglyphics on the walls at regular intervals but I didn’t realize they indicated doors until the Mechandroid told me to stop. All I had to do was touch the wall and a shutter opened like a cat’s-eye, slitted, then oval, enlarging till I could step through into the room beyond. Behind me the panel closed noiselessly.

It was a large room and there was a matter-transmitter in a corner. The walls were banked with paneling carrying the most complicated set of controls I had ever seen. On a glassy pillar in the center of the floor was a transparent box, small enough to hold in my palm, and it was bathed in a sparkle of glittering lights that poured out from two pencil-like cylinders embedded in the pillar, one on each side of the box.

Within the box was a golden marble.

“I know,” I said dizzily. “It’ll grant me three wishes.”

“That type of humor is a defense mechanism against fear,” Belem told me unsympathetically. “Here is the main reason why I chose the difficult and dangerous method of entering your mind. No men of this age would have gone with me this far. They’re all conditioned against Mechandroids.

“You were the only one who could and would have got into the Subterrane. In that transparent box is, I think, the only weapon against which we have no defense at all. As long as it’s within the field of radiation, as it is now, it’s harmless. Remove it and, within two minutes, it, becomes activated.”

“What is it?”

“A complicated pattern of energies. It’s positively charged now. When it’s activated, it becomes negatively charged. Then it creates a dead field for nearly a mile around it, in which no matter-transmitters will operate.”

“That doesn’t seem so dangerous. You can get along without matter-transmitters long enough to walk a mile, can’t you?”

“Not if we’re under siege. You saw our laboratory. Warfare is still a matter of siege unless one wants to wipe everything out and they don’t. They’ll want to inspect our work. With matter-transmission you can’t besiege a place.

“Everyone inside would simply leak away and escape, taking all their important work with them. This one weapon here is the only completed matrix available at this time. It takes a long while to complete the necessary energy-pattern. So, if we eliminate it, we can stand off a siege long enough to clear out the laboratory.”

“Eliminate it how?”

“Set the matter-transmitter controls to—anywhere. Some obsolete receiver at the edge of the galaxy, maybe. Pick up that box and—fast!—put it in the transmitter, before the radiation dies and it activates. Then the box will appear at the edge of the galaxy and paralyze energy facilities there.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Long enough. It wouldn’t harm humans but they’d have to walk to a station outside its field. The box can’t be moved, incidentally, or you could just carry it to a spot beyond the range of the nearest transmitter. After it’s activated it has almost absolute inertia. Right now, though, it’s portable. Can you touch it?”

I put out a tentative hand that was stopped in mid-air about a foot above the box. I pushed against nothing. I couldn’t pass the invisible barrier.