"But, Dona!" I cried. "From where the mirror hurls us, there can be no
returning. Malgarth said--"
"But Malgarth is dead!" the ghost of her voice came back. "He died
before we were thrown outside the universe. Now his New Robots rule
the mirror. And they are not evil, Bari, since his dominion is
removed--things so beautiful could not be. They respect mankind, as
the makers of the robots--and the destroyer of Malgarth! They promise
now to be the friends of man, Bari--and the two races, striving in
friendship together, can reach a greatness never dreamed of!
"They control the mirror, Bari. They can set its focus back in our
universe."
"If they are friendly--" the question burned away my own concern--"what
of the others? Verel and Kel? Is it too late--?"
"The science of the New Robots can save their lives," that receding
voice told me. "They will be leaders among the survivors of
mankind.--They are weeping, now, for you, Bari."
"The other two?" I asked anxiously.
"Even they survive," said that dying whisper in the pit. "That same
power of the mirror that hurled them out of space, the New Robots used
to bring them back, before they perished. They cannot speak of what
they saw beyond. The engineman is silently chewing his weed; the cook,
sobbing for a drink."
* * * * *
The whisper faded. For a little time I was all alone in that strange
lightless abysm. Frantically, I called the name of Dona, of Dondara,
until the whisper came again:
"Farewell, Bari. I can see no more. Nor speak. For the Stone is dying.
We must each go alone through the mysterious portal ahead. I shall wait
for you, beyond. Come to me, Bari!"
The thinning whisper was then lost forever in that crevasse of
midnight. Whirling darkness pressed thick upon me, and cleared
away. And I found that I was standing, reeling, in the middle of an
unfamiliar room.
The walls cleared before my throbbing eyes. Gasping for breath, as if I
had just that instant escaped the strangling tentacles of the robot, I
staggered into a Morris chair. Wonderment overcame all my pain.
For the furnishings were those of my own age, my own country! There
were familiar books on the shelves. The calendar above the writing desk
was for October, 1938. The mirror of Malgarth, somehow, had set me back
twelve hundred thousand years in time!
In my bruised hand, I suddenly discovered--in the same hand with which
I had held the hand of that ghost of the Stone--was a great pellucid
brick of diamond. The Stone itself!
Holding it up to the light, in trembling fingers, I could see deep
within it a faint, tiny image--the lovely miniature of Dona, of Dondara
Keradin. I called to it, desperately, but it did not move or answer.
I tried even to warm life into the diamond, against my body. But the
Stone was dead.
And my own body, it came to me as the first bitter fever of grief
subsided, was also at the verge of death. Already weakened, doubtless,
by the ages I had slept, it had now been crushed beyond recovery.
Working in some agony, I have been three days and nights writing this
narrative. Strength for the task has come from what source I do not
know. I want my son Barry to read it, and I am bequeathing to his care
the jewel that was the Stone of Dondara.
I have made no appeal to medical aid. The questions of baffled medical
science would have been too difficult for a dying man to answer. And I
have no wish to live any longer. My work is done.
These long and painful days and nights have not been lonely. For the
diamond lies beside me on the desk, and I have felt an unseen presence
with me. It still seems strange for me, the scientist, the skeptic, to
write that I yet hope to find the soul of her who was the Shadow of the
Stone.
But I do.