The meadows held only Slag and himself. Thor shook his head, and looked
at the grasses. Even against the red, there should be bloodstains
visible. But the blood had gone where the men had gone.
"They don't even bleed," he said. "You sure you hit that guy, Slag?"
"Slag hit him!"
"I don't understand it. They come and go unseen. They must come from
somewhere. They must have dwelling places."
He lifted a long brown arm, thickly muscled. With it, he swept the red
grasslands, the grey rocks, the sky with its gigantic orb of sun. For
many days they had trod this world, and always found it as they saw it
now. Empty and barren, like a newborn planet.
Karola ran to catch them, and then the three walked on and on, into the
sunset.
* * * * *
Eight days later, they found the Discoverer. At first Thor thought him
another rock, so almost perfectly did his queer markings and sprawling,
bloblike form match the stone. And then when he moved, in a peculiar,
pouring sort of slide, and the electric tingles marched up and down his
spine, Thor knew he was alive.
"Hallo," called Thor.
The blotched thing swung about. There were no eyes to be seen in its
immense shape, but Thor knew he was being surveyed, and closely.
"You are an Earthman," ran a thought in his mind. "The woman and the
man are Klogorons."
Thor said eagerly, "You know that? Then you must also know where we
are--how we came here?"
"I know, yes."
"And those men that come and go? And why we see no cities, no
habitations where they live? Do you know that too?"
"The Discoverer knows everything. I am the Discoverer. I live
everywhere and nowhere. Or at least I did until the madness that is
this queer space lapped out at me and brought me here, just as it did
you.
"To understand, you must think of the universe that you know as a big,
big bubble. It is stable and steady. It has its star clusters with
their space velocities and planetal orbits. Inside the big bubble
everything is orderly--except one thing.
"That one thing is a very tiny bubble. A sort of cancer, you might say.
It obeys no laws. Its very space coordinates and vectors are different
than ours. It is fluid--always in motion. Its space segments are so
alien that they can reach right through ordinary space, annihilating
distance, and seize upon objects."
"But that's nonsensical," protested Thor.
The Discoverer thought-beamed, "I said it is not space as we know
space. Let me put it this way: the magnet can draw metal to it
without touching the metal. So this space-cancer can attract objects
by reaching out for them, drawing them toward it--through a sort of
purplish mist--by some power of magnetic attraction."
Thor made a sound as if he understood, and the Discoverer went on,
"The segment of the rebel-universe came through the true universe, and
touched you--"
"Touched my house on the Midwestern campus."
"Yes. It drew you within itself--"
"But Karola and Slag! They came out of the air right in the middle of
my living room."
"They were in the magnetic pull, too. And where their space and this
space met, was the middle of your living room."
Thor looked at Karola, whose forehead was wrinkled in tiny furrows as
she followed the thoughts of the Discoverer. Slag was off to the right,
chasing a fat rabbit bounding ahead of him in terror.
The Discoverer went on, "I sought entrance to this world many eons ago.
It was one of the few spots in space I had never visited. Again and
again I sought to enter, but its strangely twisted space-time continuum
proved too much. Always I failed.
"And then, when I was visiting--I am almost all brain and it is a habit
of mine to roam a bit--I was visiting a planet of what you call the
Magellanic Cluster when everything went blank and I found myself tugged
through the purple space and landed here, stretched across a rock."
Thor said, "You claim you can roam, mentally. Away from your body, that
is."
"Your world would call it astral projection, in which the spirit
levitates from the body and crosses distance. The high-energy potential
of the mind is used to dissociate the ethereal self, with which I
include the mental self, from the matter of the body."
Thor grunted dubiously, but the Discoverer went on, "I was engaged in
astral projection to the Magellanic Cluster when this space lapped at
my body that rested in the ruins of ancient Flormaseron. It is a form
of magnetic current that did the trick. Not ordinary magnetism, but a
current of it."
Thor thought of the Ehrenhaft experiments and nodded. He said, "And
what of this world where we are? We saw some men--"
"Not men. Androids. They are semi-human, invested by Aava with a
synthetic life-force."
"Aava?"
"Aava is the Green Flame. He rules this land. He is like nothing I
have ever seen. He can create, to an extent. He can destroy. He has
made androids to serve him, but he is limited in materials on this
planet. It is mostly rock and sand. If he had enough material, he could
make millions of the androids. As it is, he can, and has made only
thousands."