Van Vogt, AE The Best of AE van Vogt

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He was mentally staggered by the artistic perfection of the room.
He had already, as he floated down, noticed that there were large archways leading to adjoining
chambers. He had glimpses of furniture, machines, objects, shining bright and new. He surmised they
were artifacts of either the centaur or other civilizations. But he could not take time to explore. His
attention fastened on a stairway that led down to the next level.
He went down it and presently found himself facing an-other energy barrier. Penetrating it exactly as he
had the other, he moved on and into a chamber filled with sea water. Inset in the floor of that huge room
was a planet that glimmered with the green-blue of an under-sea civilization.
And that was only the beginning. Cemp went down from one level to another, each time through an
energy screen and through a similarly decorated chamber. Each was inlaid in the same way with precious
stones and glinting metals. Each had breathtaking scenes from what he presumed were habitable planets
of far stars, and each had a different atmosphere.
After a dozen such chambers, Cemp found that the impact was cumulative. Realization came to him that
here, inside this planetoid, had been gathered such treasure as probably did not exist anywhere else.
Cemp visualized the seven-hundred-odd cubic miles that comprised the interior of the most fantastic
asteroid in the galaxy, and he remembered what Mathews had said that perhaps the planetoid was the
city and Earth was the farm .
It began to seem that the man s speculation might be truth.
He had been expecting to collide momentarily with an inhabitant of the planetoid. After passing three
more chambers, each with its glowing duplicate in miniature of a planet of long ago and far away, Cemp
paused and recon-sidered.
He had a strong feeling that in learning of these treasures, he had gained an advantage which he must
not lose and that the Silkies did indeed have their living quarters on the side away from the sun and that
they did not expect anyone to arrive in this surprise fashion.
The idea continued to seem correct, and so he turned back and was presently dropping directly toward
the dark side. Again the cave openings and, a few score feet inside, the energy barrier. Beyond that were
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air and gravitation exactly like those at sea level on Earth.
Cemp floated down into a smoothly polished granite chamber. It was furnished with settees, chairs, and
tables, and there was a long, low-built bookcase at one end. But the arrangement was like that in an
anteroom formal and unlived in. It gave him an eerie feeling.
Still in his Silkie form, he went down a staircase and into another chamber. It had soil in it, and there was
vegetation, which consisted of temperate-zone Earth shrubs and flowers. Once more, the arrangement
was formal.
On the third level down were Earthlike offices, with in-formation computers. Cemp, who understood
such matters, recorded what they were. He observed also that no one was using this particular source of
data.
He was about to go down to the next level, when an energy beam of enormous power triggered the
superfast defense screen he had learned from the Kibmadine.
The coruscation as the beam interacted, in an ever-vaster intensity, with Cemp s barrier screen lit the
chamber as if sunlight had suddenly been let in. It stayed litaswhoever was directing the beam tested the
screen s durability in a sustained power thrust.
For Cemp, it was a fight that moved at lightning speed down the entire line of his defenses and came
finally up against the hard core of the second method the Kibmadine had taught him.
There, and only there, he held his own.
7
A minute went by before the attacker finally seemed to accept that Cemp simply used the beam itself to
maintain the barrier. Hence, it took nothing out of him, and the barrier would last as long as the beam did,
reforming as often as necessary.
As suddenly as it had begun, the attacking energy ceased.
Cemp stared around him, dismayed. The entire chamber was a shambles of twisted, white-hot
machinery and debris. The granite walls had crumbled, exposing raw meteorite rock. Molten rock
dripped in a score of flowing rivers from the shattered ceiling and walls. Great sections were still tumbling
and sliding. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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