In the black, cramping tunnel Thorn could only swing his knife in a
narrow arc, and the snarl of the attacking dog was concentrated into a
grating roar that hurt his eardrums. Nevertheless, knife took effect
before fangs, and with an angry whimper the dog backed away--there was
no room to turn.
From the receding scuffle of its claws Thorn could tell that it had
retreated almost to the beginning of the tunnel. He relaxed from the
crouch that had put his back against the rocky roof, sprawled in a
position calculated to rest elbows and knees, and considered his
situation.
Of course, as he could see now, it had been an inexcusable blunder to
enter the tunnel without first building a fire to insure his being
able to get back to a place from which he could use his slingshot.
But coming down the ravine he hadn't seen a sign of the devils, and
there was no denying it had been necessary to revisit the cave to see
if Thorn III had any extra food, weapons, or clothing stored there.
The need for food was imperative, and yesterday he and Darkington had
completely failed in their hunting.
He wondered if Darkington would attempt a rescue. Hardly, since it
would be late afternoon before the gnarled little man returned from
his own hunting circuit. With night coming on, it was unlikely that
he would risk his life venturing down into the ravine for the sake of
a man whom he believed to be half-crazy. For Thorn had tried to tell
him altogether too much about alternate worlds in which Civilization
had not perished. Darkington had dismissed all this as "the dreams,"
and Thorn had shut up, but not until he realized he was forfeiting
all Darkington's confidence in him as a hard-bitten and realistic
neo-savage.
Besides, Darkington was a little crazy himself. Long years of solitary
living had developed fixed habit patterns. His hunger for comradeship
had become largely a subjective fantasy, and the unexpected appearance
of an actual comrade seemed to make him uncomfortable and uneasy rather
than anything else, since it demanded readaptation. A man marooned in
a wilderness and trying to get back to civilization is one thing. But
a man who knows that civilization is dead and that before him stretch
only dark savage eons in which other creatures will have the center of
the stage, is quite a different animal.
Something was digging into Thorn's side. Twisting his left hand back at
an uncomfortable angle--his right still held the knife or cutter--he
worked the pouch from under him and took out the offending article.
It was the puzzling sphere that had stayed with him during all his
passages between the worlds. Irritably he tossed it away. He had wasted
enough time trying to figure out the significance or purpose of the
thing. It was as useless as ... as that graveyard of skylons up there.
He heard it bound up the tunnel, roll back a way, come to rest.
Evidently his captors heard it too, for there came a sharp mewing and
growling, which did not break off sharply, but sank into a confused
palaver of similar sounds, strongly suggestive of some kind of speech.
Once or twice he thought he recognized human words, oddly telescoped
and slurred to fit feline and canine palates. It was not pleasant to
be cramped up in a tunnel and wondering what cats and dogs were saying
about you in a half-borrowed, quasi-intelligent jargon.
* * * * *
And then, very softly, Thorn thought he heard someone calling his name.
His almost immediate reaction was a sardonic grimace at the vast number
of unlikely sounds a miserable man will twist into a resemblance of his
name. But gradually the fancied sound began to exert a subtle pull on
his thoughts, dragging them away toward speculations which his present
predicament did not justify.
But who is to say what thoughts a trapped and doomed man shall think?
As Thorn told himself with some calmness, this was probably his last
stretch of reflective thinking. Of course, when death came sufficiently
close, the fear of it might enable him to escape into another body. But
that was by no means certain or even probable. He reflected that every
exchange he had made had been into a worse world. And now, presumably,
he was at the bottom, and like energy that has reached the nadir of its
cycle of degradation, unable to rise except with outside help.
Besides, he did not like the idea of dooming any other Thorn to this
predicament, although he was afraid he would do it if given the chance.
Again he dreamily fancied he heard his name called.
He wondered what was happening to those other Thorns, in their
hodgepodged destinies. Thorn III in World II--had he died in
the instant of his arrival there, or had the Servants noted the
personality-change in time and perhaps spared him? Thorn II in World I.
Thorn I in World III. It was like some crazy game--some game devised by
a mad, cruel god.
And yet what was the whole universe, so far as it had been revealed to
him, but a mad, cruel pageantry? The Dawn myth was right--there were
serpents gnawing at every root of the cosmic ash Yggdrasil. In three
days he had seen three worlds, and none of them were good. World III,
wrecked by subtronic power, cold battlefield for a hopeless last stand.
World II, warped by paternalistic tyranny, smoldering with hate and
boredom. World I, a utopia in appearance, but lacking real stamina or
inward worth, not better than the others--only luckier.
Three botched worlds.
He started. It was as if, with that last thought, something altogether
outside his mind had attached itself to his mind in the most intimate
way imaginable. He had the queerest feeling that his thoughts had
gained power, that they were no longer locked-in and helpless
except for their ability to control a puny lever-assembly of bones
and contractile tissue, that they could reach out of his mind like
tentacles and move things, that they had direct control of a vastly
more competent engine.
A faint sound up the tunnel recalled his altered mind to his present
predicament. It might have been a tiny scrape of claws on rock. It
was not repeated. He gripped his knife. Perhaps one of the beasts was
attempting a surprise attack. If only there were some light--
* * * * *
A yellowish flame, the color of the woodfire he had been visualizing,
flared up without warning a few feet ahead, casting shafts of ruddy
glare and shadow along the irregular tunnel. It lit up the muzzles
of a gaunt gray dog and a scarred black cat that had been creeping
toward him, side by side. For an instant surprise froze them. Then
the dog backed off frantically, with a yelp of panic. The cat snarled
menacingly and stared wildly at the flame, as if desperately trying to
figure out its _modus operandi_.
But, with Thorn's thought, the flame advanced and the cat gave ground
before it. At first it only backed, continuing to snarl and stare. Then
it turned tail, and answering in a great screech the questioning mews
and growls that had been coming down the tunnel, fled as if from death.
The flame continued to advance, changing color when Thorn thought of
daylight. And as Thorn edged and squirmed along, it seemed to him that
somehow his way was made easier.
The tunnel heightened, widened. He emerged in the outer chamber in time
to hear a receding rattle of gravel.
The flame, white now, had come to rest in the middle of the rocky
floor. Even as he stooped, it rose to meet him, winking out--and there
rested lightly on his palm the gray sphere, cool and unsmirched, that
he had tossed away a few minutes before.
But it was no longer a detached, external object. It was part of
him, responsive to his every mood and thought, linked to his mind by
tracts that were invisible but as real as the nerves connecting mind
with muscle and sense organ. It was not a machine, telepathically
controlled. It was a second body.
Relief, stark wonder, and exulting awareness of power made him weak.
For a moment everything swam and darkened, but only for a moment--he
seemed to suck limitless vitality from the thing.
He felt a surge of creativeness, so intense as to be painful, like a
flame in the brain. He could do anything he wanted to, go anywhere he
wanted to, make anything he wanted to, create life, change the world,
destroy it if he so willed--
And then--fear. Fear that, since the thing obeyed his thoughts, it
would also obey his foolish, ignorant, or destructive ones. People
can't control their thoughts for very long. Even sane individuals
often think of murder, of catastrophes, of suicide--
Suddenly the sphere had become a gray globe of menace.
And then--after all, he couldn't do _anything_. Besides any
other limitations the thing might have, it was certainly limited by
his thoughts. It couldn't do things he didn't really understand--like
building a subtronic engine--