But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
_The Marshes of Glynn_, Sidney Lanier.
Like a dreamer who falls head-foremost for giddy miles and then is
wafted to a stop as gently as a leaf, Thorn plunged down the main
vertical levitator of the Opal Cross and swam out of it at ground
level, before its descent into the half mile of basements. At this
hour the great gravity-less tube was relatively empty, except for the
ceaseless silent plunge and ascent of the graduated subtronic currents
and the air they swept along. There were a few other down-and-up
swimmers--distant leaflike swirls of color afloat in the contracting
white perspective of the tube--but, like a dreamer, Thorn did not seem
to take note of them.
Another levitating current carried him along some hundred yards of
mural-faced corridor to one of the pedestrian entrances of the Opal
Cross. A group of revelers stopped their crazy, squealing dance in the
current to watch him. They looked like figures swum out of the potently
realistic murals--but with a more hectic, troubled gaiety on their
faces. There was something about the way he plunged past them unseeing,
his sleepwalker's eyes fixed on something a dozen yards ahead, that
awakened unpleasant personal thoughts and spoiled their feverish
fun-making.
The pedestrian entrance was really a city-limits. Here the one-building
metropolis ended, and there began the horizontal miles of half-wild
countryside, dark as the ancient past, trackless and roadless in the
main, dotted in many areas with small private dwellings, but liberally
brushed with forests.
A pair of lovers on the terrace, pausing for a kiss as they adjusted
their flying togs, broke off to look curiously after Thorn as he
hurried down the ramp and across the close-cropped lawn, following one
of the palely-glowing pathways. The up-slanting pathlight, throwing
into gaunt relief his angular cheek-bones and chin, made him resemble
some ancient pilgrim or crusader in the grip of a religious compulsion.
Then the forest had swallowed him up.
A strange mixture of trance and willfullness, of dream and waking,
of aimless wandering and purposeful tramping, gripped Thorn as he
adventured down that black-fringed ghost-trail. Odd memories of
childhood, of old hopes and desires, of student days with Clawly,
of his work and the bewildering speculations it had led to, drifted
across his mind, poignant but meaningless. Among these, but drained of
significance, like the background of a dream, there was a lingering
picture of the scene he had left behind him in the Sky Room. He was
conscious of somehow having deserted a friend, abandoned a world,
betrayed a great purpose--but it was a blurred consciousness and he had
forgotten what the great purpose was.
Nothing seemed to matter any longer but the impulse pulling him
forward, the sense of an unknown but definite destination.
He had the feeling that if he looked long enough at that receding,
beckoning point a dozen yards ahead, something would grow there.
The forest path was narrow and twisting. Its faint glow silhouetted
weeds and brambles partly over-growing it. His hands pushed aside
encroaching twigs.
He felt something tugging at his mind from ahead, as if there were
other avenues leading to his subconscious than that which went through
his consciousness. As if his subconscious were the core of two or more
minds, of which his was the only one.
Under the influence of that tugging, imagination awoke.
Instantly it began to recreate the world of his nightmares. The
world which had obscurely dominated his life and turned him to
dream-research, where he had found similar nightmares. The world
where danger lay. The blue-litten world in which a mushroom growth of
ugly squat buildings, like the factories and tenements and barracks
of ancient times, blotched the utopian countryside, and along whose
sluice-like avenues great crowds of people ceaselessly drifted, unhappy
but unable to rest--among them that other, dream Thorn, who hated and
envied him, deluged him with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.
* * * * *
For almost as long as he could remember, that dream Thorn had tainted
his life--the specter at his feasts, the suppliant at his gates, the
eternal accuser in the courts of inmost thought--drifting phantom-wise
across his days, rising up starkly real and terrible in his nights.
During the long, busy holiday of youth, when every day had been a
new adventure and every thought a revelation, that dream Thorn had
been painfully discovering the meaning of oppression and fear, had
been security swept away and parents exiled, had attended schools in
which knowledge was forbidden and all a man learned was his place.
When he was discovering happiness and love, that dream Thorn had been
rebelliously grieving for a young wife snatched away from him forever
because of some autocratic government's arbitrary decrees. And while
he was accomplishing his life's work, building new knowledge stone by
stone, that dream Thorn had toiled monotonously at meaningless jobs,
slunk away to brood and plot with others of his kind, been harried by
a fiendishly efficient secret police, become a hater and a killer.
Day by day, month by month, year by year, the dark-stranded dream life
had paralleled his own.
He knew the other Thorn's emotions almost better than his own, but the
actual conditions and specific details of the dream Thorn's life were
blurred and confused in a characteristically dreamlike fashion. It
was as if he were dreaming that other Thorn's dreams--while, by some
devilish exchange, that other Thorn dreamed his dreams and hated him
for his good fortune.
A sense of guilt toward his dream-twin was the dominant fact in Thorn's
inner life.
And now, pushing through the forest, he began to fancy that he could
see something at the receding focus of his vision a dozen yards ahead,
something that kept flickering and fading, so that he could scarcely
be sure that he saw it, and that yet seemed an embodiment of all the
unseen forces dragging him along--a pale, wraithlike face, horribly
like his own.
The sense of a destination grew stronger and more urgent. The mile
wall of the Opal Cross, a pale cataract of stone glimpsed now and then
through overhanging branches, still seemed to rise almost at his heels,
creating the maddening illusion that he was making no progress. The
wraith-face blacked out. He began to run.
Twigs lashed him. A root caught at his foot. He stumbled, checked
himself, and went on more slowly, relieved to find that he could at
least govern the rate of his progress.
The forces tugging at him were both like and infinitely unlike those
which had for a moment controlled his movements at the symchromy.
Whereas those had seemed to have a wholly alien source, these seemed to
have come from a single human mind.
He felt in his pocket for the object he had stolen from Clawly's
mysterious confidant. He could not see much of its color now, but that
made its baffling texture stand out. It seemed to have a little more
inertia than its weight would account for. He was certain he had never
touched anything quite like it before.
He couldn't say where the notion came from, but he suddenly found
himself wondering if the thing could be a single molecule. Fantastic!
And yet, was there anything to absolutely prevent atoms from
assembling, or being assembled, in such a giant structure?
Such a molecule would have more atoms than the universe had suns.
Oversize molecules were the keys of life--the hormones, the activators,
the carriers of heredity. What doors might not a supergiant molecule
unlock?
The merest fancy--yet frightening. He started to throw the thing away,
but instead tucked it back in his pocket.
* * * * *
There was a rush in the leaves. A large cat paused for an instant in
the pathlight to snarl and stare at him. Such cats were common pets,
for centuries bred for intelligence and for centuries tame. Yet now, on
the prowl, it seemed all wild--with an added, evil insight gained from
long association with man.
The path branched. He took a sharp turn, picking his way over bulbous
roots. The pathlight grew dim and diffuse, its substance dissolved and
spread by erosion. At places the vegetation had absorbed some of the
luminescence. Leaves and stems glowed faintly.
But beyond, on either side, the forest was a black, choked infinity.
It had come inscrutably alive.
The sense of a thousand infinities pressing upon him, experienced
briefly at the Yggdrasil, now returned with redoubled force.
The Yggdrasil was true. Reality was not what it seemed on the surface.
It had many roots, some strong and true, some twisted and gnarled,
nourished in many worlds.
He quickened his pace. Again something seemed to be growing at the
focus of his vision--a flitting, pulsating, bluish glow. It was like
the Yggdrasil's Nidhogg motif. Nidhogg, the worm gnawing ceaselessly at
the root of the tree of life that goes down to hell. It droned against
his vision--an unshakable color-tune.
Then, gradually, it became a face. His own face, but seared by
unfamiliar emotions, haggard with unknown miseries, hard, vengeful,
accusing--the face of the dream Thorn, beckoning, commanding, luring
him toward some unknown destination in the maze of unknown, unseen
worlds.
With a sob of courage and fear, he plunged toward it.
He must come to grips with that other Thorn, settle accounts with him,
even the balance of pleasure and pain between them, right the wrong of
their unequal lives. For in some sense he must _be_ that other
Thorn, and that other Thorn must be he. And a man could not be untrue
to himself.
The wraithlike face receded as swiftly as he advanced.
His progress through the forest became a nightmarish running of the
gauntlet, through a double row of giant black trees that slashed him
with their branches.
The face kept always a few yards ahead.
Fear came, but too late--he could not stop.
The dreamy veils that had been drawn across his thoughts and memories
during the first stages of his flight from the Opal Cross, were torn
away. He realized that what was happening to him was the same thing
that had happened to hundreds of other individuals. He realized that an
alien mind was displacing his own, that another invader and potential
cryptic amnesiac was gaining a foothold on Earth.
The thought hit him hard that he was deserting Clawly, leaving the
whole world in the lurch.
But he was only a will-less thing that ran with outclutched hands.
Once he crossed a bare hilltop and for a moment caught a glimpse of the
lonely glowing skylons--the Blue Lorraine, the Gray Twins, the Myrtle
Y--but distant beyond reach, like a farewell.
He was near the end of his strength.
The sense of a destination grew overpoweringly strong.
Now it was something just around the next turn in the path.
He plunged through a giddy stretch of darkness thick as ink--and came
to a desperate halt, digging in his heels, flailing his arms.
From somewhere, perhaps from deep within his own mind, came a faint
echo of mocking laughter.