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completed the analysis of the clothing and established the period from which
it came as mid-Twentieth Century. It was about six hours after that before
they breached the shell of force. I was notified and I sent for
Topaz and came in myself for the finish. Now watch."
The cavern took shape again before me. Clear in the bath of what was probably
ultra-violet, because it brought the images out so clearly, the four sleepers
lay. But this time there was a hum of activity around them. Men passed before
the camera, obscuring it now and then, carrying lenses and long glowing tubes
and angular tilings a little like sextants. I heard Topaz's sweet high
laughter and Paynter's rebuke, "Watch," Paynter said beside me. "It happened
very suddenly."
As he spoke, I saw the change begin. It was like a cleavage in space, a
widening crack that spiderwebbed across the empty air like a riven bubble of
plastic. The sleepers showed for an instant, distorted as though seen through
a shattering substance with a different refractive index from air.
Then the cavern darkened for an instant. The four bodies seemed to spring into
more dimensional reality I sensed that their clarity was not due to the
ultraviolet bath. It was as though a stereopticon image had become tangible.
For a flashing second the four figures became part of normal space. The shell
of energy Dr. Essen had created so long ago no longer prisoned them beyond
space and time.
The place grew darker still. It gave me a feeling of inexplicable urgency. I
was on the verge of remembering something that reddish twilight with faint
lights twinkling through it was was
My thought paused. For the bodies were crumbling, I had a second of horrible,
sickening terror, as though I felt my own flesh falling into dust too.
Instinctively my fingers tightened on my legs. It was bewildering to feel my
own flesh firm beneath my hands while before me in the projection I could see
the same flesh crumble from my bones.
I watched myself disintegrate in the red twilight that had filled the cavern,
fall swiftly into dust as if the thousand years of time we had cheated as we
slept was taking its toll all in one final moment. But I knew that was not the
answer. Living flesh does not crumble like that and we had been living until
the egg broke around us. There was
file:///F|/rah/Henry%20Kuttner/Kuttner%20-%20The%20Time%20Axis%20UC.txt (45 of
80) [2/4/03 10:17:21 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Henry%20Kuttner/Kuttner%20-%20The%20Time%20Axis%20UC.txt some
more terrifying solution than that.
Suddenly, in my bewilderment and terror, I knew what the answer was. That
shadowy red twilight, with lights faintly flashing across an empty world I had
seen that dusk before. In that same twilight I had seen the Face of Ea looking
out over the world's night. That crumbling of our flesh into dust had been no
accident.
I knew I had watched the four of us murdered in our age-long sleep,
deliberately dispersed into nothingness by what? By whom? I had no way of
guessing, but it seemed to me the red twilight that filled the cave indicated
something of an answer. Nothing was happening to us at random, I knew fully in
that moment of revelation. It was planned, deliberately planned and by the
people of the
Face?
They had summoned us across the millenniums. Had they planned our shipwreck
here on the strand of some middle future and then, with calm intent, scattered
our dissolving bones upon the cavern floor, having used and finished us?
No, for we were still alive.
Only I remembered my own identity clearly, but I was sure the icily violent
ego of Murray lay buried somewhere beneath the surface of Paynter's mind. I
had looked into Letta Essen's eyes in the lovely face of Topaz. De Kalb must
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linger somewhere, submerged but waiting, behind the metal eyes of Belem. So we
were not dead.
The dust that had been ourselves ceased its crumbling and falling and settled
into long, roughly man^shaped mounds on the floor of the cave.
"That happened coincidentally," Paynter said with elaborate detachment. "But
something rather odd took place at the same time. Look."
The scene changed. The focus had shifted to another lens on the far side of
the cavern. In the foreground Paynter stood, behind Topaz. Their faces were
intent and horrified as they watched the egg begin to crack.
The film had stepped back sixty seconds and I was watch- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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