He had to go through the flames!
"You proclaimed that the winner of the mental monomachy would
go through the flames, Shar Bytu," he said. "As winner, and as
representative of Earth, I claim that right."
Shar Bytu looked at him and his eyes were like flecks of cold
moonlight. Suddenly, they twinkled.
"The right is yours, Earthling. And something tells me that you may,
at long last, be the one to succeed. I read it in your mind. Yes,
your theory is a good one. To think that menace came from Earth. From
little, uncivilized, barbaric Earth."
He waddled away, his ponderous reptilian head moving from side to side.
Adatha Za pressed her hot cheeks against Jonathan's chest. Her voice
was low, troubled: "How will you fight the flames, Jonathan? What
weapon is there that can destroy them?"
"No weapon under all the stars and all the suns can destroy the
shadows, Adatha Za. They are alien. The only hope there is--is to shut
them off."
He shot up rapidly from the sanded floor of the Arena. Beneath him
for one long instant, he saw Adatha Za with her lovely face upturned:
hands clasped between her breasts, red mouth bitten until it swelled,
dark eyes misted. Shar Bytu stood beside her, his scaly hide brushing
her naked arm. The others were grouped in twos and threes: silent and
motionless, watching him.
How long they stood there, Jonathan never knew. His mind was fully
occupied in a furious effort of incredible concentrative power: forcing
his body into the rigid and alien pattern that his mind knew would
alone spell safety from disaster.
Light that never deviated from its straight and ruthless path. Light
that would absorb matter, that would shower a stream of electrons from
it, releasing the electrons in a blast of power that fed upon the stuff
it touched. Such were the black shadows!
And as he hurtled onward into the flames, he forced his body into beams
of light, rigid and unbending. He had to merge with the flames, or be
destroyed.
He hurtled onward, toward the ebony maw that shook and glistened and
bellied against the dark of space like a translucent blob of jelly.
He held out his hands like a diver, going into the shadows. The
movement helped him concentrate on straightness. The wind and the
blackness was about him, licking at his lighteous form. Along his chest
and thighs the flames touched, caressing.
The blackness was himself, now; part of him, a segment of his mind, a
portion of his body.
And he went on swiftly.
Toward his goal.
On the planet, Neeoorna, Adatha Za knew the salt taste of her tears.
Her red lips were puffed by the teethmarks driven deeply into their
softness. Her breasts rose swiftly.
The others stood about her, and their minds were blank.
At that moment they comprehended, but joy and awe were stronger than
mere knowledge.
The black shadows winked once. They winked again, fleetingly.
Then they disappeared.
V
Dr. Wooden stood silent as Jonathan Morgan drew his hand from the
switch that drove a bath of heat at the blocks of calcatryte set in
their metallic cradles. The humming of motors stopped. The blackish
screen in the background went silent, dead.
"Well," said Dr. Wooden, straightening. "Hello."
Jonathan sat down and put out a trembling hand, drew an open pack of
cigarettes toward him.
"I've been far away," he said slowly. "To the other side of the
universe. Billions of miles away, and yet--in your own backyard."
Dr. Wooden grinned and sat on the edge of the sandstone tabletop. He
lighted a cigarette himself, saying, "Tell me."
Jonathan told him. And then he said, "It seems understandable
enough, really. Those powers I possess. What are they but an innate
adaptability to environment. And isn't that the true goal of Nature?
"The environment is what destroys, is what weakens, is what kills.
Call it a blast furnace. Call it disease. Call it a clawing tiger. It
is, nevertheless, our environment: temporary or permanent. To survive
that, man must be immortal, in a physical sense. In the sense that he
possesses _in himself_ all the necessary attributes to enable him to
overcome that environment. That way lies immortality."
Dr. Wooden regarded the glowing tip of his cigarette. He said, "That's
clear enough. It is fantastic, but who knows what changes one million
or two million years will bring in man. Lord knows, it brought a lot of
changes on Earth itself! Now, about the flames--"
Jonathan crushed out his cigarette.
"They were the emanations from the calcatryte. I realized that
eventually. It stood to reason. It had to be something alien to a
universe where light curves. Something that either ate up matter or
made it invisible or opened a door for it to leak out somewhere, into
nothingness.
"Calcatryte gives off straight light, so powerful that it eats through
metal. It could as easily eat through dirt and rock, through the moon
of a planet, through a planet itself. Through the universe, in short.
In a universe based on curving light, that unbendable light was an
anomaly. It ate up our universe, or started to."
"Again, clear enough. It's reasonable, and possible. But when you
went into the shadows and passed through them--you emerged here in my
laboratory. But my laboratory is billions upon billions of miles from
Neeoorna."
Jonathan grunted, "In terms of ordinary space, yes. I passed through
hyperspace."
"That's a mathematical concept."
"I know. But we--you have proved it exists. It has been proven
mathematically."
Dr. Wooden looked dubious. Jonathan picked up a pencil and pressed down
with the point on a slip of graph paper.
"That black mark, that dot, is one-dimensional. Extend a line from that
point to another dot. The line is also one-dimensional. Let us put
the pencil on the line, supersede the line with the pencil. Since the
pencil has three dimensions, so does the line--for the pencil is the
line.
"Suppose an _n_-dimensional object. Supersede the pencil with the
_n_-dimensional object and we have an _n_-dimensional line. It is
an _n_-dimensional space of _n_-dimensional points, instead of our
original definition of a line as a single dimensioned space of points
set in a row.
"Ordinary space is called three-dimensional because it is occupied
by three-dimensional things. Planes, for instance. But if we speak
of lines of spheres or circles, we can easily step into the realm of
_n_-dimensionality.
"The drawback is that we can't see it. We can't envision
_n_-dimensionality.
"Consequently, we have always been intrigued by many-dimensionality
because we can't picture it to ourselves. But the calcatryte rays
weren't hindered by a lack of imagination. They just zoomed off into
an _n_-dimensional space, and wound up near Neeoorna. They were lines,
remember, straight lines. And lines can be _n_-dimensional."
Dr. Wooden rubbed his chin and said, "Could be, could be. But how does
hyperspace solve your problem?"
"A dot inside a circle can go outside that circle without crossing its
circumference. Likewise, I could pass from the inside to the outside
of a sphere without going through the surface of a four-dimensional
object.
"Those calcatryte rays beamed out from your lab into hyperspace,
passing through ordinary space without touching it, and appeared
billions of miles away. When I entered the shadows, I followed their
course."
Dr. Wooden drew a deep breath, saying, "If I hadn't seen you
materialize out of thin air--" and broke off, laughing.
"Seeing does enter it, doesn't it? But the attempts that were made
to fight the shadows! Why were the attackers always destroyed?
Unless--unless their weapons backfired on them--"
"That's my thought. They were shooting three-dimensional objects at an
n-dimensional space. The three-dimensional objects never got anywhere.
They didn't even leave their source. They expended their frightful
energy right where they began."
"Well," muttered Dr. Wooden. "You could talk for hours and not _prove_
anything."
* * * * *
He broke off, looking at Jonathan. He lifted a wooden mallet and held
it out to him.
"Destroy it," he said simply. "If it's that much of a danger to the
universe, it deserves obliteration."
Jonathan put out his hand, brushed the mallet aside.
He bent over the table, setting both hands on it, partially supporting
his weight.
The calcatryte in the metal cradles began to quiver as though made of
soluble, moving liquid. Their veins ran into channels of color, red and
green and blue and yellow. The blocks hazed over, writhing.
The calcatryte was fading, bit by bit.
Jonathan stood up. He looked worn, but his lips smiled.
"It's done," he whispered.
"You won't stay?"
A smile came and dwelt on Jonathan's lips.
"No," he said. "No, I won't stay. I am going back to Neeoorna, and then
to Zarathza--to look at a sunrise coming up over the waters of the
Jaralayan Sea."
He went out, and the door closed behind him, softly.