Part 10 (1/2)

Ramsey nodded slowly. He could barely see Margot, although he held her hand. He could barely see Vardin although they stood hand in hand too.

The music was un-Earthly, incapable of repet.i.tion, indescribably the loveliest sound he had ever heard. He wanted to sink down into the obscuring gray murk and weep and listen to the haunting, sad, lovely strains of sound forever.

”What can it possibly be?” Margot asked.

Surprisingly, it was Vardin who answered. ”Music of the Spheres,” she said. ”It's a legend on Vega III, my world.”

”And on Earth,” Ramsey said.

Vardin told them: ”On all worlds. And, like all such legends, it has a basis in reality. This is the basis.”

That didn't sound like timid little Vardin at all. Ramsey listened in amazement. He thought he heard Vardin laugh.

Music. But didn't the notes need the medium of time in which to be heard? How could they hear music here at all? Or were they hearing it?

Perhaps it merely impinged on their minds, their souls, just as they were able to hear one another's thoughts as words....

They'd never understand fully, Ramsey knew suddenly. Perhaps they could grasp a little of the nature of this place, a shadow here, the half-suggestion of the substance of reality there, a stillborn thought here, a note of celestial music there, the timeless legacy of proto-man, whatever proto-man was....

”The fog is lifting!” Vardin cried.

The fog was not lifting.

Then it was.

Ramsey would never forget that. Vardin had spoken while the dense gray murk enveloped them completely.

Then it began to grow tenuous.

As if Vardin's words had made it so. Little Vardin, shy, frightened Vardin, suddenly, inexplicably, the strongest, surest one among them....

The sky, white and dazzling, glistened. The gray murk glistened too, a hundred yards off in all directions, like a wall of polished gla.s.s surrounding them.

In the very middle of the bell-jar of visibility granted them all at once, stood a black rectangular object.

”The teleporter!” Margot cried. ”The matter-transmitter! I know it is. I _know_ it is!”

Ramsey stood waiting breathlessly.

No, he realized abruptly, not breathlessly. You couldn't say breathlessly.

For Ramsey had not breathed, not once, since they left the _Enterprise_.

You didn't breathe on a timeless world. You merely--somehow--existed.

”It's opening!” Margot cried.

The black rectangle, ominously coffin-shaped, was indeed opening.