Empire of Two Worlds Read online

  “I’ll reserve an opinion on that. Get used to the idea, because Earth is where we’re going.”

  “But that’s impossible.” This time it was Tone who spoke.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Bec answered. “Centuries ago the gateway from Earth was destroyed, blown up, its substance dispersed. The connection with Earth went with it and nobody has passed either way since. But there’s something you don’t know. Back in Klittmann I spent a lot of time talking to the alchemist. I’d call him the wisest man in Klittmann. He’s studied all the old books and everything and he told me something about the gateway nobody else realises.”

  Harmen took all this praise impassively. The old coot, I thought, he’s behind all this. He’s captivated Bec with his weird theories.

  “You may or may not know,” Bec continued, “that the gate consisted of substance that existed both here on Killibol and simultaneously on Earth. What I for one didn’t know was that the gateway was opened in the first place by an alchemist. That right, Harmen? Go on, tell them.”

  The alk nodded soberly. “True it is, as can be read in the ancient documents by one able enough to read the arcane symbols. The substance of the gateway was derived from tincture, the prima materia of existence which is not governed by the laws of space and time. Else how was the gateway possible — how could exoteric science have created something that existed in two locations at the same time? Tincture is indestructible, indivisible, and hence—” He broke off. “Let your leader tell you.”

  “It’s certainly not in any of the workmen’s manuals,” Reeth admitted, rubbing his chin. “To tell the truth I’ve never given a thought in my life to how the gateway worked. That was all in the past, long before I was born.”

  “What Harmen means is,” Bec resumed, “that though the stuff the gateway was made of was scattered over hundreds of thousands of miles by an atomic explosion, it never really lost its cohesion. Over the centuries it sort of gathered itself up again, attracted to itself, as it were. And what’s more, in the same place it was before. Harmen calculates that by now the gateway is reconstituted again.”

  Reeth was frowning. “You mean the molecules have all gravitated back to where they were before the explosion?”

  “That’s right,” Bec began, but the alk corrected him. “Tincture has no molecules. Atomic and molecular matter are corruptions of the primordial hyle, which is single, whole and indivisible, yet not in a way that we can readily understand. To the gross senses it may seem possible for it to be divided in certain conditions. Then again, very great force can cause it to become attenuated to the point where it apparently vanishes; yet given time it reverts to the form given to it when it was first distilled. Hylic objects cannot be made to change their shape except by very difficult alchemical processes.”

  “And this is what will have happened to the gateway?” I queried.

  “The gateway is not pure hyle, it is true; but the derivation is close enough for the same to hold.”

  “Well, there you have it, boys,” Bec finished. “Don’t worry if you don’t understand all those technicalities. The important thing is that we know where the gateway is. And we should be able to reach it before our food runs out.”

  Grale had been cleaning his gun. He threw it down in an expression of disgust, a rare show of rebellion for him. “The whole thing is cockeyed crazy! You know what I think, boss? We’re being taken by an alk loon!”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Reeth said in calmer, meditative tones. “It sounds reasonable. I mean, it hangs together. But if you ask me it’s an awful long shot.”

  “Sure, it’s a long shot,” Bec replied amiably. “It’s a gamble. Maybe we’ll never reach the gateway. Or maybe Harmen here is wrong about it. We’ll soon know.”

  Grale was angry. “We should have stayed in Klittmann!“

  “In Klittmann you’d be dead already. You think we had any choice about getting out? Wise up — we’re all that’s left of the organisation. In Klittmann we were the core, the main office, and the cops wouldn’t have let up until they got us. I don’t like this situation any more than you do.”

  Tone sniffed. His face had that sneaky, twitchy look that meant his system was crying out for a recharge. I knew what he was thinking. Whether there was any pop on Earth. Maybe he hoped that grew out of the ground there, too.

  Bec resumed driving. I slid into the adjoining seat.

  “What’s it going to be like on Earth, boss?”

  “There’s no knowing. It seems Earth and Killibol exist at different … time-rates from one another.” Plainly he had difficulty with the concept. “Sometimes one speeds up relative to the other, sometimes slows down. While centuries have passed here on Killibol something like a million years or more have gone by on Earth. It’s anybody’s guess what we’ll find.”

  I let that sink in for a minute. “So it’s a one-way trip. There’s no coming back because. …”

  Bec glanced at me fiercely. “Klein, we’re coming back! Don’t ever doubt that!” Suddenly he chuckled. “Confusing, isn’t it? Think about it. If we spent a year on Earth and came back here, we’d find that only seconds had passed on Killibol. Actually it isn’t even that complicated. Harmen says the two planets are currently synchronised in their time-rates. He says they’re both at the apogee of their cycles. So if everything goes right — and I only give us fifty-fifty — we’ll be able to pass to and fro at will between Earth and the Dark World.”

  “The Dark World?”

  “Sure. That’s what the old books call Killibol.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Of course, it’s never very bright out in the open here. Not as bright as in the cities.”

  “It’s not what you’d call dark, either.”

  “That’s right.” He was silent for a moment. Then he lifted his eyes upwards. There were stars in the sky. I’d watched them often in the last few days.

  “You know something, Klein? Earth is in another galaxy. Billions of light-years away. Just think of it! It’s an awful long way away.”

  A day later Bec brought the sloop to a halt for a few minutes. The engines ticked over in the midst of the same sombre, grey plains. In the middle distance stood a city.

  “According to the map that’s Chombrel,” Bec said. “It’s a dead city now. Their tanks caught a plague.”

  He circled it slowly, studying it. Something about it seemed to interest him. And in fact it didn’t look like Klittmann. It was more sculptured. Its walls rose straighter, but then broke off jaggedly.

  “Chombrel was architecturally fashioned to represent a dead tree stump,” Bec said finally. “See the way it juts up on one side, as if the trunk had broken off?”

  I’d seen a picture of a tree once, but the whole thing meant little to me. Bec put the sloop on course again. “It’s a queer, involved kind of symbolism on a dead world. …”

  What else he might have said I don’t know, because just then I noticed something I didn’t like. Grale had Gelbore up against the rear wall of the cabin. By now she thought of herself as my girl, and so did I. She was too scared to resist, but she glanced at me, perplexed and distressed.

  I shot across the cabin and jerked him away. Coolly he checked me, holding up his hand threateningly, dangerously.

  “Hold it, man. A woman is everybody’s property.”

  Bec looked at us, then turned back to the wheel. “What’s the matter with you, Klein? This isn’t too considerate.”

  Hotly Gelbore and I exchanged feelings through the eyes. “The girl is mine!” I snarled. “Any klug who wants her passes me first.”

  Becmath still did not deign to present more than his back to the argument, but he said sternly: “Now listen, you klugs. Any trouble over our little nomad girl and I myself will throw her off the sloop. So calm it.”

  Grale had a slack-mouth grin. “And who gets the girl?”

  “Klein is over you. Do what he says.”

  It didn’t make me feel good t
hat Bec had to reassert my authority over the others like that; but at least I had Gelbore. Grale gave me a dirty look and then joined Reeth, Hassmann and Tone in a game of cards. Gelbore huddled with me in a corner, regarding them with fear.

  “Don’t worry,” I murmured. “They had it hard enough in Klittmann not to hold any resentment. You just stick with me.”

  “Sure, I’ll stick with you,” she murmured back, giving a little shiver.

  I left her and dropped back into the seat next to Bec. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” he replied harshly. His voice was hard and brutal, harder than I had ever heard it before.

  Eventually we came to a broad river of clear water, which according to Harmen’s map we had to cross. Floating down the river were big slabs of the lighter-than-water rock that is found in some parts. When the stream proved too deep for the sloop to ford, Reeth proposed that we lash it to one of these slabs.

  The job took some time, but everyone brought up in Klittmann is something of a mechanic — as well as an electrician and builder. We managed to grapple one of the bigger slabs and hauled it to the shore using the sloop’s engine. The hardest part was lashing the sloop down safely. Then we cast off and went flowing downstream.

  There was a landmark we had to watch for, so Bec figured we might as well stay on the water until we found it. The rock slab was bigger in area than the sloop, and we took to sitting out on it, detailing a couple of men at a time to steer us with poles.

  I found myself sitting with Bec, alone and out of earshot of the others. Bec was eager to talk about those things difficult to understand that were so typical of him of late. When he looked at the others his expression was sardonic and he gave a half-grunt, half-chuckle.

  “Gangsters,” he said. “That’s what we are, gangsters. Remember what the alchemist said? Gangsters loomed large among the people who came to Killibol. Maybe the corruption and stagnation began with that. But you know something, Klein? We are gangsters, and we are sharper than anybody in Klittmann.”

  “That may be so,” I replied, “but here we are outside.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You know why? Only we represent change in Klittmann. We are dangerous. Have to be eliminated. Listen to me, Klein: we could be the germ of something different on this world. Yes, gangsters and all. Who else is there? In Klittmann now there is only self-interest. We could go beyond that — make a state that existed for itself and commanded the allegiance of all men. A state that conquered other cities and made an empire that released inventiveness in men and changed the whole world.”

  I guess Bec had been working on me for a long time. Ever since I had met him, if the truth were known, I had been coming under the spell of his personality and of his ideas. Some of them I didn’t understand, but he had aroused a kind of loyalty in me that was like something magical. Certainly it went far beyond my upbringing.

  “That state, that empire,” he told me, “is the hope of mankind. Something not for a man’s own sake, but for the sake of the thing itself. You with me Klein?”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked, swallowing.

  “The others are good guys — capable. But that’s all. Reeth maybe … but Grale and Hassmann? Not on your life. They’re mindless klugs. Tools. You have a mind, Klein. Maybe it’s pretty hard to find sometimes … but I’ve watched you. An idea gets through to you in the end.

  “So my state, Klein, that comes before everything else. A city that progresses, right?”

  I was carried away by what he was saying. It seemed to me that here was the first new, clean thing I had heard since I was born. A sense of loyalty that went beyond all personal considerations; here was what Bec was putting to me, and it sounded invincible. Maybe that’s ridiculous considering the situation we were in, but Bec had that quality: he could make even defeat seem fascinating and hopeful.

  “Before everything, right?” Bec repeated. “Even before a woman.”

  Gelbore was sitting on the edge of the raft, trailing her hand in the water. I looked at her and swallowed again. Much though I was inspired by Bec’s vision, there was one thing I had to admit.

  “Sometimes nothing comes before a woman, Bec,” I said.

  So what did Becmath do when he heard this?

  He took out his handgun and before I fully realised what was happening he shot Gelbore. From former occasions I was familiar with the accuracy of Bec’s shooting. She took it in the head. Without a single cry she toppled into the water and disappeared from view.

  When I saw her falling off the raft like a lump of clay my guts knotted into a tight ball. At the same time something indescribably sweet and painful passed through me. I sprang to my feet, on fire.

  “You klug! I’ll kill you for that!”

  “The state first, Klein.” Bec’s voice was incongruously gentle.

  A man has to be logical. “O.K.,” I pledged with difficulty. “The state first.”

  From that moment Bec had me hooked in a condition of unshakable loyalty. It was the first time in my life I had known real dedication. I think I had to have that, or I would never have been able to face the fact that I did nothing to avenge the killing of Gelbore.

  And yet the whole thing was insane. Here we were, practically dead men, while Bec spouted dreams about state and empire. He talked to me more during the journey, expanding on his plans. He would establish regular traffic between the cities, he said, wipe out the nomad bands and set up staging posts so that travellers could replenish their supplies en route. It all sounded fine, the only missing part was how he was going to achieve all this.

  But like I say, by now I was hooked on the dream and instead of greeting it with scepticism or derision I took it all with an air of hard-headed realism.

  During the second day on the river we saw the landmark that would lead us to the gateway: a thousand-foot column of stainless steel. It was weathered and worn, corroded in places. Obviously it had been there a long time, but just as obviously it must have been erected after the nuclear explosion had destroyed the gateway. For some reason the people of that time had left it there as a marker.

  Beyond the pillar a shallow valley ran between two long, rounded mounds for about two to three miles. After we grounded the sloop we followed it to where the mounds met. At the junction, or just before it, the ground was fissured into a gaping chasm that ran a fair distance. Situated neatly over that chasm was something that at first you weren’t sure was there.

  It was like a big transparent, very clear jelly with a lavender tint. In shape it was an elongated ovoid, a big egg.

  Bec looked at the alchemist.

  Harmen nodded. “My calculations were correct. That’s it.”

  We all got out to explore. When you touched the material of the gateway it was like putting your hand in very thin water. Thin oil, maybe. It didn’t impede motion but it felt cool and smooth.

  The fissure was a couple of hundred feet deep. Its being there was probably accidental — accidental insofar as it was a by-product of the atomic explosion centuries ago — because the ground thereabouts was considerably broken up and smaller cracks rayed out at various angles.

  We went back to the sloop to talk it over. “How do we know it still works?” Grale snapped tensely.

  “Have you got any instrument that might test it?” Bec asked Harmen.

  The alk shook his head. “Afraid not. The only way is to try it out. The gate is directional, by the way. You have to enter it from the right direction. Going through from this end of the egg, straight between the walls of the valley, will take you to Earth, You get nowhere by trying it from any other angle. Likewise you take the reverse procedure to get from Earth to Killibol.”

  Hassmann sighed. “And if it don’t work you go to the bottom of the gulf. That’s pretty!”

  “You’ve played crazier games, Hassmann.” Bec settled himself comfortably in the driver’s seat and started the motors.

  “You’re not taking us through just like
that!” Grale protested. He was sweating slightly. “We ought to send somebody through first! To see if it works! To see what’s on the other side—”

  “And if it doesn’t work, Grale, what are you gonna do then? You want to sit here and starve?”

  Bec twisted round to look Grale straight in the eyes as he said this. We were all silent.

  Grale started to laugh.

  Bec backed up the sloop to get a good run. Then we went at the gateway full tilt. The Big Egg loomed up, shimmering — suddenly Grale and Reeth let loose with Jain guns and gave out raucous whoops and laughs to give vent to their nervous energy—

  There was an instant of utter darkness. Then we came out into the sunlight — and man! We all knew why they call Killibol the Dark World.

  We had to wear eye-filters ever since. The sun seared my eyes like a white-hot iron. The landscape had a million colours which thrust themselves into my eyeballs like knives.

  How bright it is! How bright is that place!

  Five

  Have you ever been in a reactor room when they let the shields down? It was like that. Light: blinding, dazzling light that came pouring through the sloop’s windows. I got a split-second impression of incredible colours and then I could see nothing but glare and I flung my arms across my eyes, gasping with the pain that lanced through them.

  All was confusion, with everybody yelling and going crazy. Hassmann fell heavily against me; Grale and Reeth continued firing the Jains, yelling their heads off, even though they were blind.

  I knew we’d hit ground on the other side because the sloop bumped and rolled forward, jerking and swaying. Shortly it came to a stop, and I could hear Bec cursing violently, and screaming for silence.

  “The shutters! The shutters, you klugs!”

  His penetrating voice goaded me into action. I found a lever that brought down a section of the steel shutters that could seal all the windows, afterwards closing the eye-holes. Bec was stumbling about the sloop, grabbing anybody he found and pulling levers. He pulled Grale and Reeth away from their clattering Jains, at which they protested loudly.