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r r
"You may come within, Earthman. We are not enemies." The archway loomed dark before
him. Step by step he entered. After the glare of the white sun the dimness of the room was
like a moonless night Lanarck blinked.
Slowly objects about him assumed form. Two enormous eyes peered through the gloom;
behind appeared a tremendous domelike bulk. Thought surged into Lanarck's brain. "You
are unnecessarily truculent. Here will be no occasion for violence."
Lanarck relaxed, feeling slightly at a loss. Telepathy was not often practiced upon Earth.
The creature's messages came like a paradoxically silent voice, but he had no knowledge
how to transmit his own messages. He hazarded the experiment.
"Where is Isabel May?"
"In a place inaccessible to you."
"How did she go? Her spaceboat is outside, and she landed but a half-hour ago."
"I sent her away."
Keeping his needle-beam ready, Lanarck searched the building. The girl was nowhere to be
found. Seized by a sudden, fearful thought, he ran to the entrance and looked out. The two
spaceboats were as he had left them. He shoved the needle-beam back into the holster and
turned to the leviathan, in whom he sensed benign amusement.
"Well, then-who are you and where is Isabel May?"
"I am Laoome," came the reply. "Laoome, the one-time Third of Narfilhet, Laoome the
World-Thinker - the Final Sage of the Fifth Universe ... As for the girl, I have placed her, at
her own request, upon a pleasant but inaccessible world of my own creation."
Lanarck stood perplexed.
"Look!" Laoome said.
Space quivered in front of Lanarck's eyes. A dark aperture appeared in midair. Looking
through, Lanarck saw hanging apparently but a yard before his eyes a lambent sphere-a
miniature world. As he watched, it expanded like a toy balloon.
Its horizons vanished past the confines of the opening, Continents and oceans assumed
shape, flecked with cloud-wisps. Polar ice caps glinted blue-white in the light of an unseen
sun. Yet all the time the world seemed to be but a yard distant. A plain appeared, rimmed
by black, flinty mountains. The color of the plain, a ruddy ocher, he saw presently, was due
to a forest carpet of rust-colored foliage. The expansion ceased.
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r r
The World-Thinker spoke: "That which you see before you is matter as real and tangible as
yourself. I have indeed created it through my mind. Until I dissolve it in the same manner,
it exists. Reach out and touch it."
Lanarck did so. It was actually only a yard from his face, and the red forest crushed like
dry moss under his fingertips.
"You destroyed a village," commented Laoome, and caused the world to expand once more
at a breathtaking rate, until the perspectives were as if Lanarck hung a hundred feet above
the surface. He was looking into the devastation which his touch had wrought a moment
before. The trees, far larger than he had supposed, with boles thirty or forty feet through,
lay tossed and shattered. Visible were the ruins of rude huts, from which issued calls and
screams of pain, thinly audible to Lanarck. Bodies of men and women lay crushed. Others
tore frantically at the wreckage.
Lanarck stared in disbelief. "There's life! Men!"
"Without life, a world is uninteresting, a lump of rock. Men, like yourself, I often use. They
have a large capacity for emotion and initiative, a flexibility to the varied environments
which I introduce."
Lanarck gazed at the tips of his fingers, then back to to the shattered village. "Are they
really alive?"
"Certainly. And you would find, should you converse with one of them, that they possess a
sense of history, a racial heritage of folklore, and a culture well-adapted to their
environment."
"But how can one brain conceive the detail of a world? The leaves of each tree, the features
of each man-"
"That would be tedious," Laoome agreed. "My mind only broadly conceives, introduces the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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