"El-ve-don?" she asked just as eagerly as when she had found him, half
as though correcting him.
He shook his head. "Just Eldon." Her eyes clouded and she frowned.
After a moment she spoke again, and again he shook his head. "Sorry, no
savvy," he declared.
She snapped her fingers as though remembering something and hurried
from the room, returning with a small globe of cloudy crystal. She
motioned him to lie back, and for a minute or two rubbed the ball
vigorously against the soft, smooth skin of her forearm. Then she held
it a few inches above his eye and gestured that he was to look at it.
The crystal glowed, but not homogeneously. Some parts became brighter
than others, and of different colors. Patterns formed and changed, and
watching them made him feel drawn out of himself, into the crystal.
The strange girl started talking--talking--talking in an unhurried
monotone. Gradually scattered words began to form images in his mind.
Pictures, some of them crystal clear but with their significance still
obscure, others foggy and amorphous. There were people and--things--and
something so completely and utterly vile that even the thought made his
brain cells cringe in fear of uncleansable defilement.
It must have been hours she talked to him, for when he came out of the
globe and back into himself her voice was tired and there were wrinkles
of strain across her forehead. She was watching him intently and he
suspected he had been subjected to some form of hypnosis.
"Where am I? How did I get here?" he asked, and realized only when the
words were out that he was speaking something other than English.
Krasna did not answer at once. Instead a look of unutterable
sadness stole over her face. And then she was weeping bitterly and
uncontrollably.
Eldon was startled and embarrassed, not understanding but wishing he
could do something, anything, to help her. Crying females had always
disturbed him, and she looked so completely sad and--and defeated. The
lemur-thing glowered at him resentfully.
"What is it?" he asked.
"You are not El-ve-don," she sobbed.
With his new command of her language, perhaps aided by some measure
of telepathy, he received an impression of El-ve-don as a shining,
unconquerable champion of unspecified powers, one who was fated to
bring about the downfall of--of something obscenely evil and imminently
threatening. He could not recall what it was, and Krasna's wracking
sobs did not help him think clearly.
"Of course I'm not El-ve-don," he declared, and felt deeply sorry for
himself that he was not. "I'm just plain Eldon Carmichael, and I am--or
was--a biophysicist." Once, before Victor Schenley had tried to kill
him, he _had_ been a competent and reasonably happy biophysicist.
At last she wiped her eyes.
"Well, if you don't remember, you just don't, I guess," she sighed.
"You are in the world of Varda. Somehow you must have formed a Gateway
and _come through_. I found you just by chance and thought--hoped--that
you were El-ve-don."
She went on with a long explanation, only parts of which Eldon
understood.
* * * * *
He was quite familiar with the theory of alternate worlds--his work
with bound charges had given him an inkling of the actuality of
other dimensions, and the fantastic idea that bound charges existed
simultaneously in two or more "worlds" at once, carrying their
characteristic reactions across a dimensional gap had occurred to him
frequently as his experiments had progressed. He had even entertained
the notion that bound charges were the basic secret of life itself--but
the proof still seemed unbelievable. Varda was a world adjoining his
own, separated from it by some vagary of space or time-spiral warping
or some obscure phase of the Law of Alternate Probabilities. But here
he was, in Varda.
He distinctly remembered hearing one of the resonant system components
in his laboratory let go, not _flow_ but _break_, and guessed that the
sudden strain might have been sufficient to warp the very nature of
matter in its vicinity.
"Your world is one of the Closed Worlds," Krasna explained. "Things
from it do not _come through_ easily. Unfortunately the one from which
the Luvans came is open much of the time."
Eldon tried to think what a Luvan was, but recalled only a vaguely
disquieting impression of something disgusting--and deadly.
"I hoped so much." Tears gathered in Krasna's strange eyes. "I thought
perhaps when I found you that the old prophecy--the one to defeat
Sasso--but perhaps I have been a fool to believe in the old prophecy at
all. And Sasso--" Her expressive mouth contorted with loathing.
"How do I get back to my own world?" Eldon demanded.
Krasna stared at him until he began to fidget.
"There is but one Gateway in all Varda, the Gateway of Sasso," she
declared in the tone of a person stating an obvious if unpleasant fact.
"And only El-ve-don can defeat the Faith."
"Oh!" He laughed in mirthless near-hysteria at the thought of himself
as the unconquerable El-ve-don. Her words left him bleakly despondent.
"What happened to the others who were near me when--this--happened?" he
asked. "The man and the woman?"
Krasna straightened in surprise. "There were others? Oh! Perhaps one of
them is El-ve-don!"
"I doubt it," Eldon said wryly.
* * * * *
But Krasna's excitement was not to be quelled. She spoke to the
lemur-thing as if to another human, and the creature scuttled up
the tunnel leading to the surface. Eldon thought once more of the
witch-familiars of Earth legends. If he had _come through_ to Varda,
perhaps Vardans had visited Earth.
"We shall find out about them soon," she said.
"What happens to me?" Eldon wanted to know.
He had to repeat his question, for Krasna had suddenly become deeply
preoccupied. At last she looked at him. There was pity in her glance,
not pity for his situation but pity for a disfigured, frightened and
querulous cripple. She did not understand the overwhelming longing
for Earth which was mounting within him every second. Her pity grated
upon his nerves. He could pity himself all he chose--and he had reason
enough--but he rejected the pity of others.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Oh, you can stay with me, I guess. That is, if you dare associate with
me." There was bitterness in her voice.
None of it made sense. She had saved him from the forest, brought him
to her home. Why should he be afraid to associate with her? But all he
wanted was to find Margaret, if she were in this strange world, and
escape back to Earth. There, though he was a cripple, he was not so
abysmally ignorant. He knew he should feel grateful to this red-haired
girl, but deep in his brain an irrational resentment gnawed. He tried
to fight it down, knowing he had to learn much more about his new
environment before he could survive alone. The last shreds of his
crumbling self-confidence had been stripped away.
Suddenly he realized he was ravenously hungry.
"All right," the girl said. "We will eat now."
He stared at her in discomfiture. He had not mentioned food. She
laughed.
"Really," she said, "you seem to know nothing about closing your mind."
Resentment flared higher. She was a telepath, and he was not proud of
his thoughts.
The passageway into which he followed her was dark, but after a few
steps her hands began to light the way as they had in the forest.
"How do you do it?" he asked. To him the production of cold light in
living tissues was even more astounding than her control of gravity.
That still seemed too much like a familiar dream he had had many times
on Earth, and it probably had some mechanical basis.
She smiled at him as though at a curious child. "That is old knowledge
in the Open Worlds. Your Closed Worlds must be very strange."
"But how do you control it?"
She shrugged her lovely shoulders. "You may be fit to learn--later."
But she spoke doubtfully.
The food was unfamiliar but satisfying, warmed in a matter of seconds
in an oven-like box to which he could see no power connections or
controls. In reply to his questions she pointed to a hexagonal red
crystal set in the back of the box and looked at him as though he
should understand.
One of the foods was a sort of meat, and with only one arm Eldon found
himself in difficulty. Krasna noticed, took his eating utensils and cut
it into bite-sized bits. She said nothing, but he finished the meal in
sullen silence, resentful that he needed a woman's help even to eat.
Afterwards Krasna buckled on her heavy belt with the dagger swinging at
her hip.
"I must go out now," she said. "The not-quite-men of the Faith are
prowling tonight, and Luvans are with them."
"But--?"
"You could not help."
The reminder of his uselessness rankled, but still he felt a pang at
the thought of a girl like her going into danger.
"But you?" he asked.
"I can take care of myself. And if not, what matter? I am Krasna."
Once more she read his thoughts.
"No. Stay here." It was not a request but an order. "If you were to
fall into the hands of--her--it would add to my troubles. And my own
people would kill you on sight, because you have been with me."