A huge food-box was on a table in the corner.
Burton went on up, stopping now and then, until he arrived at the top of the shaft. The trip had taken fifteen minutes. On one side was another bay with a corridor outside. On his left was a small corridor which quickly opened into a giant one, at least one hundred feet square. After setting the chair down in the larger hallway, he leaned over the shaft and blinked his lantern three times. The answering flashes were tiny but sharp. Nur, the next one, would not make any stops and so would get to Burton in about twelve minutes.
Burton had never been patient except when it was absolutely necessary and often not then. He got back into the chair and moved down the hall. He’d take a six-minute tour and then return to the shaft.
He passed many open doors, all very large, giving him eye access to small and large rooms, some with equipment, some apparently for apartments. A number had many skeletons; some, a few; some, none. The corridor ran straight for at least two miles ahead of him. Just before it was time to return, he saw on his right an entrance with a closed door. He stopped the chair, got out, withdrew his pistol, and cautiously approached the door. Above it were thirteen symbols, twelve helices arranged in a circle with a sundisc in the center. There was no knob on the door. Instead, a metal facsimile of a human hand was attached to the door where a knob should have been. Its fingers were half closed as if about to seize another hand. Burton turned it, and he pulled the door open. The room was a very large, very pale-green semitransparent sphere surrounded by and intersected by other green bubbles. On the wall of the central sphere at one side was an oval of darker green, a moving picture of some sort. The odor of pine and dogwood rose from the trees in the background, and in the foreground a ghostly fox chased a ghostly rabbit. On the bottom of the largest sphere, or bubble, were twelve chairs in a circle. Ten contained parts of skeletons. Two were bare of anything, even dust.
Burton had to breathe deeply. This room brought back frightening memories. It was here that he had awakened after killing himself 777 times to escape the Ethicals. It was here that he had faced the Council.
Now those beings who had seemed so godlike to him were bones.
He put one foot beyond the threshold, poking it through the bubble with only a slight resistance. His body followed, feeling the same tiny push. Then his other foot came through, and he was standing on springy nothingness or what seemed to be nothingness.
He reholstered his pistol and passed through two bubbles, the surfaces closing behind him, but air moving past him, and then he was in the “Council room.” When he got near the insubstantial chairs, he saw that he’d been mistaken. One of the seemingly empty seats held a very thin circular convex lens. He picked it up and recognized the many-faceted “eye” of the man who’d seemed to be the chief of the Council, Thanabur.
This was no jewel, no artificial device to replace an eye, as he’d thought then. It was a lens which could be slipped over the eye. It felt greasy. Perhaps it was lubricated so it wouldn’t irritate the eyeball.
With some difficulty and revulsion, he inserted the lens under his eyelid.
The left eye saw the room through a distorting semiopaque-ness. Then he closed his right eye.
“Oooohhhh!”
He quickly opened the right eye.
He’d been floating in space, in a darkness in which distant stars and great gas sheets shone and there was the feeling, but not the direct effect, of unbelievable coldness. He’d been aware that he was not alone, though. He knew, without having seen them, that he was followed by uncountable souls, trillions upon trillions, perhaps far more. And then he was shooting toward a sun, and it became larger, and suddenly he saw that the flaming body was not a star but a vast collection of other souls, all flaming, yet burning not as in Hell but with an ecstasy that he’d never experienced and which the mystics had tried to describe but was indescribable.