Rocket to Limbo

Find the answer while you still can!

He turned to find Peter staring at him in alarm. “Lars! I heard that,” he whispered hoarsely.

“You—what?”

“I heard what you were thinking just then” Peter’s face was white. “It was clear as crystal, as clear as if—they—had been thinking it.”

Lars was trembling. “It’s no good, Peter. We just can’t do it this way.”

“We can’t go back now. We’ve got to try!”

“No, no. There’s something else we have to try first. Like you said, you heard me thinking just then. You heard me before. And I’ve been picking things up from you, just snatches, here and there, but I have. Don’t you see what that means?”

“I can see that we’re going to be caught cold unless we move fast.”

“That is what the lessons have been for, Peter. That is what the City-people have been trying to teach us. Only they didn’t mean ‘teach’ the way we think of it, with book tapes and experimental labs. They haven’t been teaching us, they’ve been training us!”

Peter stood stock-still. “ ‘The Masters who fed us and trained us,’ ” he breathed.

“Of course! Trained them for what? Look around you at this city, man.”

From all around them a wash of thought-patterns had been rising like a wave, alarmed, fearful, angry. They realized that they had almost been shouting at each other, and now Peter gave a groan of dismay as figures appeared at the end of the vault, on the stairs. “Too late!” he cried. “Run for it, Lars!”

But they couldn’t run. The first of the City-people to see them gave a powerful cry of alarm, and they stood rooted, unable to move, as more and more City-people tumbled down the stairs, eyes wide, staring at the boys and at the sleeping figures, a jumble of thoughts rushing from their minds.

The strangers, down here!

A forbidden place! What are they doing here?

They were going to waken the sleeping ones— And fear rose in a bubbling torrent as they stared at the boys in horror.

And then the woman who had been training Lars was coming through the group, her eyes angry, all trace of gentleness gone from her face. We should never have waited for so long! We were wrong, it was hopeless from the start. And now even they would destroy us.

Lars faced her, his eyes blazing. You re wrong. We would not destroy you, or harm you.

You came to waken these who sleep here. It was not accusation; she knew it was true, and thrust it at him as a fact.

Yes, we did but only when the Masters permit it.

The woman paused, as though he had caught her off guard. But how could you know that the Masters permit it? The Masters said only when the time was ripe.

Then now is the time. Lars felt his pulse pounding in his throat as he forced the thought into the woman’s mind.

Now? So soon?

Lars’ eyes were bright. Now! There is a place of the Masters here, isn’t that so?

Yes, yes, of course.

Then we demand that you take us there. Now.

And then, suddenly, the City-people were crowding around them, eagerly. The fear was gone from their minds now; they were laughing and cheering as their eagerness overflowed in a powerful wave. From the woman the thought came directly to Lars: If you demand it, we must do it. The Masters are no longer here, but there is a place here where they once were. We will take you there, if you are sure you are ready to go.

It was an alien place.

The eerie, intangible alienness of it struck them both as they walked across the platform toward the oval black door before them.

It was like no other place in the city. The city and its strange people had been mysterious, puzzling, often inexplicable, different, but not alien. The things they had seen in the city at least showed some shadow of human thinking, of human minds at work.

But no human hands had built this place. Lars knew that as certainly as he knew his own name. It sat on a large circular platform, a building, if you could call it that, like a highly polished hemisphere with an oval black door in one side. Lars glanced helplessly at Peter by his side. “Have you ever seen this place before?”

“Never,” Peter said. “And I don’t like it.”