Terrors (50 page)

“Why do you ask that, Mr. Lorentzen? What bearing has it on this damned Zeta/Zed
machine and its funny behavior?”

I explained my theory that some exterior factor might be causing the system’s problems, and reasserted my original question.

“You think this is an out-of-the-way place, do you?” MacIvar pressed. “Well, indeed it is. And that’s why we chose it. I’ve been here for thirty-two years, Mr. Lorentzen, I was one of those who chose this spot for the Institute, and I’ll
tell you now, if I had it to do over, I’d have chosen a far more out-of-the-way location. The middle of the Australian desert, maybe, or better yet the farthest Antarctic glacier.”

I was astounded. “Why?” I demanded again. “This location must make it hard enough to bring in supplies and equipment, not to mention the difficulties of recruiting qualified workers. The people of the Severn Valley—well,
I don’t mean to be offensive, Mr. MacIvar, but they don’t seem to be of the highest quality.”

MacIvar gave a loud, bitter laugh. “That’s putting it mildly, now,
Mr. Lorentzen. They’re a degenerate stock, inbred and slowly sinking back toward savagery. As is all of mankind, if you ask me, and the sooner we get there, the better. This thing we call civilization has been an abomination in the eyes
of God and a curse on the face of the earth.”

So, I was confronted with a religious fanatic. I’d better change my tack, and fast. “The water that drives your generators,” I said, “Miss Parker—” MacIvar raised a bushy eyebrow “—Dr. Parker then, tells me that you use the Severn River for that purpose.”

“Yes, she is exactly right.”

“Do you make any further use of its waters?”

“Oh, plenty. We
drink it. We cook in it. We bathe in it. The Severn is the lifeline of this community. And we use it to cool our equipment, you know. Your wonderful Zeta/Zed machines can run very hot, Mr. Lorentzen, and they need a lot of cooling.”

I shook my head. “Have you tested the river for purity? Do you have a filtering and treatment system in place?”

“Yes, and yes again. Just because we’re out here
in the country, Mr. American Troubleshooter, don’t take us for a bunch of hicks and hayseeds. We know what we are doing, sir.”

I gestured placatingly. “I didn’t mean to cast aspersions. I’m merely trying to make sure that we touch every base.”

“Touch every base, is it? I suppose that’s one of your American sports terms, eh?”

By now I felt myself reddening. “I mean, ah, to make sure that no
stone goes unturned, no, ah, possibility unexamined.”

MacIvar glared at me in silence. I asked him, “What happens to the water after it’s been passed through the heat-exchange tanks?”

“It goes back into the river.”

“Has this had any effect on the local ecology? On the wildlife of the valley, or the aquatic forms found in the river itself?” I thought of those graceful yet oddly disquieting yellowish
shapes in the river, of the glow that emanated from their curving bodies and reflected off the mist above.

“None,” said MacIvar, “none whatsoever. And that is an avenue of inquiry, Mr. Troubleshooter, that I would advise you not to waste your precious time on.”

With this, MacIvar pushed himself upright and strode ponderously from the office. Something had disturbed him and I felt that his suggestion—if
not an actual warning—to steer clear of investigating
the Severn River, would have the opposite effect on my work.

At the end of the working day I feigned a migraine and asked Karolina Parker to drive me home and excuse me for the remainder of the evening. I took a small sandwich and a glass of cold milk to my room and there set them aside untouched. I changed into my sleeping garments and stationed
myself at the window. At this time of year the English evening set in early, for which I thanked heaven. I located the flickering face and flew to it without hesitation.

The tower had changed its appearance again. From its Victorian fustian it had reverted to the square-cut stone configuration of a medieval battlement. Once within the great turret room I sped by the cyclopean machinery and its
scurrying, yellowish attendants and headed quickly to the gray plain.

Hovering over the plain, I dropped slowly until I could make out the souls struggling and suffering there. More of them were apparent this night than had previously been the case, and from their garments and equipage I could infer their identity. They were members of Caesar’s legions. Yes, these pitiable beings were the survivors—or
perhaps the casualties—of the Roman occupation force that had once ruled Britain.

After a time they seemed to become aware of me and attempted variously to command or to entice me into placing myself among them. This I would not do. One legionnaire, armed with Roman shield and spear, hurled the latter upward at me. I leaped aside, not stopping to wonder what effect the weapon would have had.
It was, of course, not a physical object, but a psychic one. Yet as a soul, was I not also a psychic being, and might not the spear have inflicted injury or even death upon me?

The legionnaire’s conduct furnished me with a clue, however. He had seen me, that I knew because he aimed his throw with such precision that, had I not dodged successfully, I would surely have been impaled on the spear-point.
Even as the legionnaire stood shouting and shaking his fist at me, I willed myself to become invisible.

The look of anger on the ancient soldier’s face was replaced by one of puzzlement and he began casting his gaze in all directions as if in hopes of locating me. I knew, thus, that I was able to conceal myself from these wretched souls merely by willing myself to be unseen.

Remaining invisible,
I proceeded farther along the gray plain. There were many more souls here than I had even imagined. Beyond the
Romans I observed a population of early, primitive Britons. Hairy Picts dressed in crude animal skins danced and chanted as if that might do them some good. And beyond the Picts I spied—but suddenly, a sheet of panic swept over me.

How long had I been in the turret this night? I looked
around, hoping to see the window through which I had entered, but I was too near the gray plain, and all I could perceive in any horizontal direction was a series of encampments of captive souls, the ectoplasmic revenants of men, women, and children somehow drawn to the turret and captured by the gray plain over a period of hundreds or thousands of years.

I turned my gaze upward and realized
that the turret room was indeed open to the sky of the Severn Valley, and that night was ending and the morning sky was beginning to turn from midnight blue to pale gray. Soon a rosy dawn would arrive, and in some incomprehensible way I
knew
that it would be disastrous for me to be in the tower when daylight broke.

Thus I rose as rapidly as I could and sped over the gray plain, past the machines
and their attendants, out of the turret and home to my cousin’s house.

At work that day I met once again with Nelson MacIvar. He had appeared vaguely familiar to me at our first meeting, and I now realized that this burly, oversized man bore an uncanny resemblance to the great child who had thrown a rock at my car as it carried me from Brichester to Severnford. I came very near to mentioning
the incident to him, but decided that no purpose would be served by raising an unpleasant issue.

Rather should I save my verbal ammunition for another attempt to get MacIvar to order tests of the Severn River water used in the Institute. By this time I had come to believe that the water was impregnated with some peculiar
force
that was interfering with the operation of the Zeta/Zed System. This
force, I surmised, might be a radioactive contamination, picked up at some point in the river’s course, perhaps as a result of the fissure at the foot of the Severn Hills nearby.

When I thought of that fissure and of those hills, a feeling of disquietude filled me, and I had to excuse myself and sip at a glass of water—that same damnable Severn water, I realized too late to stop myself—while
I regained my composure.
Why
I should find thoughts of that fissure and of those hills so distressing, I could not recall.

This time MacIvar grudgingly yielded to my request, insisting that
nothing would be found, but willing in his burly, overbearing way to humor this troublesome American. I reported this potential break to Alexander Myshkin by Transatlantic telephone, and spent the remainder
of the day more or less productively employed.

Again that night I feigned migraine and excused myself from my cousin’s company. She expressed concern for my well-being and offered to summon a doctor to examine me, but I ran from her company and locked myself in my room. I stared into the fiery orb of the sun as it fell beneath the Severn Hills, then willed myself across the miles to the turret.

As I approached it tonight I realized that it had changed its form again, assuming the features of a style of architecture unknown and unfamiliar to me, but clearly of the most advanced and elaborate nature imaginable.

I flashed through the window, sped past the machines and their attendants, and hovered above the gray plain. I had reached a decision. Tonight I would pursue my investigation of
the plain to its end! I swooped low over the plain, passed rapidly over the Victorian village—for such is the way I now labeled this assemblage of souls—over the Roman encampment, over the rough Pictish gathering, and on. What would I find, I wondered—Neanderthals?

Instead, to my astonishment, I recognized the ectoplasmic manifestation of an Egyptian pyramid. I dropped toward it, entered an opening
near its base, and found myself in a hall of carven obsidian, lined with living statues of the Egyptian hybrid gods—the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the ibis-god Thoth, the crocodile god Sobk—and I knew, somehow, that these, too, were not physical representations created by some ancient sculptors, but the very
souls
of the creatures the Egyptians worshipped!

I did not stay long,
although I could see that ceremony was taking place in which worshippers prostrated themselves, making offerings and chanting in honor of their strange deities. I sped from the pyramid and continued along the plain, wondering what next I would encounter.

In Silicon Valley, Alexander Myshkin and I had spent many hours, after our day’s work was completed, arguing and pondering over the many mysteries
of the world, including the great mystery of Atlantis. Was it a mere legend, a Platonic metaphor for some moral paradigm, a fable concocted to amuse the childish and deceive the credulous? Myshkin was inclined to believe in the literal reality of Atlantis, while I was utterly skeptical.

Alexander Myshkin was right.

The Atlantean settlement was suffused with a blue light all its own. Yes, the
Atlanteans
were
the precursors and the inspiration of the Egyptians. Their gods were similar but were mightier and more elegant than the Egyptians’ their temples were more beautiful, their pyramids more titanic, their costumes more fantastic.

And the Atlanteans themselves—I wondered if they were truly human. They were shaped like men and women, but they were formed with such perfection as to
make the statues of Praxiteles look like the fumblings of a nursery child pounding soft clay into a rough approximation of the human form.

These Atlanteans had aircraft of amazing grace and beauty, and cities that would make the fancies of Wonderland or of Oz pale by comparison.

And yet they had been captured and imprisoned on this terrible gray plain!

I sped beyond the Atlantean settlement,
wondering if yet more ancient civilizations might be represented. And they were, they were. People of shapes and colors I could only have imagined, cities that soared to the heavens (or seemed to, in that strange psychic world), wonders beyond the powers of my puny mind to comprehend.

How many ancient civilizations had there been on this puny planet we call Earth? Archaeologists have found records
and ruins dating back perhaps 10,000 years, 15,000 at the uttermost. Yet anthropologists tell us that humankind,
homo sap
. or something closely resembling him, has been on this planet for anywhere from two to five
million
years. Taking even the most conservative number, are we to believe that for 1,985,000 years our ancestors were simple fisherfolk, hunters and gatherers, living in crude villages,
organized into petty tribes? And that suddenly, virtually in the wink of the cosmic eye, there sprang up the empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, of ancient China and India, Japan and Southeast Asia and chill Tibet, the Maya and the Aztecs and the Toltecs and the great Incas, the empires of Gambia and of Ghana, the mysterious rock-painters of Australia and the carvers of the stone faces of Easter
Island?

This makes little sense. No, there must have been other civilizations, hundreds of them, thousands, over the millions of years of humankind’s tenancy of the planet Earth.

But even then, what is a mere 2,000,000 years, even 5,000,000 years,
in the history of a planet six
billion
years of age? What mighty species might have evolved in the seas or on the continents of this world, might
have learned to think and to speak, to build towering cities and construct great engines, to compose eloquent poems and paint magnificent images … and then have disappeared, leaving behind no evidence that ever they had walked this Earth … or at least, no evidence of which we are aware?

Such races did live on this planet. They had souls, yes, and so much, say I, for human arrogance. This I know
because I saw their souls.

How many such races? Hundreds, I tell you. Thousands. Millions. I despaired of ever reaching the end of the gray plain, but I had vowed to fly to its end however long it took. This time, if daylight found me still in the tower, so must it be. My cousin might discover my body, seemingly deep in a normal and restorative slumber, propped up in my easy chair. But she would
be unable to awaken me.

Yes. I determined that I would see this thing to its conclusion, and from this objective I would not be swayed. I saw the souls of the great segmented fire-worms who built their massive cities in the very molten mantle of the Earth; I saw submarine creatures who would make the reptilian plesiosaurs look like minnows by comparison, sporting and dancing and telling their
own tales of their own watery gods; I saw the intelligent ferns and vines whose single organic network at one time covered nearly one third of the primordial continent of Gondwanaland; I saw the gossamer, feathery beings who made their nests in Earth’s clouds and built their playgrounds in Luna’s craters.