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tremendous speed the spiraling of the power-streams around the cyclotron, to
ride with them and perhaps for one brief instant to force more violence out of
them through the deflecting-plates which were the eyes of the mask.
She spun her mask to face Nethe's. Eye to eye, face to face, the two Gorgon
glares poured their killing energy into one another's smiling faces. Fire
flared up from that square, head-on meeting of terrible beams. Nethe's shriek
of maniacal fury heralded what had happened even before the blaze faded
between the masks. When it cleared, a long, low cry went up from the circling
watchers. For one eye of Nethe's mask was blind. The beam had burned out.
With half her fighting strength destroyed, she whirled in redoubled rage at
the crippled Goddess, her single beam weaving a net of green fire all about
that swaying, parrying figure in black robes. Desperately the Goddess,
one-handed but quicker than lightning, wove her own net of defense against the
onslaught. And the drain upon the power in the Well grew heavier. . . .
Electrons dropped like snow now out of the innermost ring. The Well flared,
sank, flared again as the lives of the sacrifices fed it briefly, pouring
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swords.
Jolt! Sawyer dropped again. For the penultimate time he dropped. Now he rode
the innermost ring, and the next drop would be into the fire.
The fire? He looked down. He looked straight into the Well. And it was bright,
bright, bright. ...
It burned the eye and the brain behind it.
It was not bright at all.
That painful glare transmuted suddenly as he neared it into a beauty that
ensnared the very soul.
The Well was a wide ring around a flatness and a glassiness like a mirror that
reflected only the golden glow of the sky. In the ring glimmered a whirling,
spinning, tumbling tumult of was it molten light, bubbling up from the heart
of the world? Bubbling up out of Earth's Pole? Was it a tossing fountain? He
could put no name to it. But the tumble and tumult of the fiery pool drew the
eye and the mind irresistibly. That tossing motion "burned inward to his
brain, fusing with it, drawing him down along a chord of his own vision.
He was dropping, dropping. . . .
He wanted to drop. He had to see this thing clearer, closer. Even so near, he
thought hazily, the bubbles were still impossible to focus on. What were they?
Bubbling liquid metal, cool and bright, like mercury? No, for they were
discontinuous. Each tossing, luminous shape was separate, and there was a
pattern in their motion. They seemed to weave a dance in and out of the very
fabric of his brain, pulling him down into the heart of the beautiful pool,
the lovely, tossing dance, the irrestible shimmer and play of enchanting
motion....
"Alper!" he shouted suddenly, the sound of his own voice coming back to him
deafeningly from the spinning walls of his hexagon.
And Alper responded. In quick, broken bursts the noise of his own blood
thundered like deep bells through the chambers of the skull, the hiss of
breathing was the steam of a gigantic turbine driving through his head.
With a shuddering breath Sawyer drew back from the terrible beauty of the
pool. He knew what it was, now. Or what it represented. This was a sight no
human eye had ever seen before, even in an analogy like the pool.
It was the complex, weaving dance of the nucleus inside the atom. One by one
the electrons had drawn inward to hurl themselves into the strong, terrible
pull of the protons in the heart of the atom. His turn, now.. . .
But once before, a hurtling electron had paused. Once before he had seen a
victim seem to gather himself and resist for a second the merging into that
beautiful, fearful dance. Thunder beat strongly in Sawyer's skull and he shut
his eyes and let all the revulsion against death that dwells instinct in the
mind of man repel the enchantment of the Well.
He dropped no farther.
The Well was an empty mirror in the center of the ring, the mouth of a pool
that opened downward on the sun. It yawned for him, but he did not drop. And
the brilliance began faintly to haze over, as if a breath had blown across the
shining mirror. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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