Slave of eternity

The sere globe of Earth spun below him, frightfully riven by the half-healed wounds of some ancient cataclysm. Dull seas steamed and rain fell and vegetation crept across the scars, but there was life in one place only.

There was a ruined city like a forest of standing shards, rising stark and cold against a desolate sky. A horde of silent figures poured through its streets, bent upon a myriad errands whose purposes he might have guessed but dared not--he found himself one of the throng, yet his dread of understanding hid their intent as a mist might have obscured their faces. The crowd moved always eastward, its thousand faces rapt in impossible ecstasy. His own expectancy mounted to an unbearable pitch, stifling him with the promise of total understanding. He had only to follow them and--

He awoke to find himself crouched on the cold floor of his bedroom, drenched with perspiration and trembling violently from the strain of fighting back the monstrous concept toward which his dream had carried him.

Marta's voice was urgent in his ears. Marta's hands tugged at his arm, her breath was warm on his damp face. "Arnol, wake up! Arnol!"

For an instant he had an indescribable sense of being infinitely multiplied, as if this moment were reproduced forever, a single frame in a succession that stretched endlessly before and behind him. Then the dream tilted and swept away and he let Marta lead him, unresisting, back to bed.

For a long time he lay shivering in the darkness, his face hidden against her warm shoulder. And at last, when the tension had gone out of him, he slept again.

They came for him at daybreak, four burly patrolmen with Council insignia on their helmets and silver shock-cones in their hands. Heric looked back as he entered their copter to see Marta on the verandah, lovely in the soft disarray of her too-early rising, her eyes bright and blind with unshed tears.

"I'll come back," he called. "It's going to be all right!"

When the copter rose he waved at her, buoyed up unexpectedly by the ring of certainty he had managed to force into his voice. He had a last glimpse of Marta before distance and the morning mists hid her, a small, forlorn figure with raised face staring after him, her belted house-robe fluttering in the wind.

They sank through the ordered vastness of Nyark the first city, into a bustle and rush that was symbolic of the Council's will to restore Nyark--and finally Earth--to their former glory. Heric was led to a quiet chamber where the Council, in their deep crescent of seats behind the Leader's throne, awaited him.

He had seen them before only in newscasts, when it had awed him a little to think that in their hands lay the destiny of a world in rebirth. He was surprised now to feel that their wrinkled parchment faces and thin bodies, hidden under sleeveless blue robes, lent them a futile anonymity rather than the distinction he had expected. Why, he thought, they look like scrawny, earthbound birds.

"Why am I here?" Heric demanded. Rebellion grew in him, roughening his voice. "I have broken no law, nor have I been lax in my overseeing. I protest this adjustment to what you call normalcy."

"Yet you must endure it, Arnol Heric," the Leader said. A rustle of assent whispered through the robed Council. "You should not have defied our messenger. It may be too late now."

Anger swelled Heric's demand. "What do you mean?"

His answer was a great, cloudy bubble that sprang from nowhere about him. The Council vanished behind its milky haze. There was a brief sensation of motion, and after that--nothing.

He was in the void of his dreams again, imprisoned in darkness. But there was a difference--the dull globe of Earth spun faint and misty, half-seen through an obscuring curtain. A smooth, hypnotic thought-current flowed into his mind from the adjuster, commanding him, warring with the half-sensed truth that still sought his awareness.

"You are Arnol Heric, overseer of cereal plantings. You have had no disturbing dreams. Forget, Arnol Heric. There is no need for alarm...."

There was a long struggle before his will fought clear, and he knew that the Leader's fear of being too late had been realized. The pitted Earth-sphere grew plain, the desolate city sharpened and drew near. He walked the thronged streets and turned his face toward the east, and this time he did not repulse the truth when it lay before him.

There was a silent room where a figure reclined laxly in a chair made massive by its crystal maze of shining coils. Two guards flanked the chair watchfully, and in it sat--

Himself.

Anger shook him like a terrible wind, without warning. It was all a monstrous farce, then--he was the center of it all, and they had hidden him in his overseer's niche to blind him to reality.

He opened his eyes in the adjuster, pushing the futile thought-current from his mind. The guards stiffened at his movement, their silver shock-cones ready.