Occasionally he saw physical work being done by artificial-seeming protoplasmic beings like giant amoebas whose manipulatory columns and sense organs varied with the task being performed. Elsewhere there labored metal robots counterfeiting spiders, wheel-beings, and many other life forms — though some of these robots seemed truly alive, as did certain large structures like gigantic electronic brains. Their transparent walls showed dark jellies glinting with tangled silvery lines finer than hairs, as if they grew nerves and thought-cells as needed.
The greater the variety of intelligent life Don saw, the more he became sensitive to its presence. Now, when he paused in the star-specked central globe, it seemed to swim with faint violet mist-beings of everchanging shape and multi-armed: cold creatures of the darkness beyond the stars. And once when he soared briefly to the upper deck, he glimpsed one of the great colored abstract forms split like an egg and spill out a horde of beings.
Yet the more sensitive he became to the presence of intelligent life, the more he was racked by the conviction that there were all around him invisible forms of it beyond his sensing — as if the Wanderer had more ghosts aboard than all her crew members.
He paused in a profoundly still room of many balconies and almost an infinitude of cases of tiny drawers, like the card catalogue room of a library. Filament-like tracks led from the drawers to viewing instruments suggesting great microscopes, and it seemed to Don that there was travel along the multiplicity of cobwebs, and he had the thought that here servile microbes and viruses were sorting and ordering for inspection molecules on which were etched the total knowledge of races and the histories of worlds. All Earth’s thought and culture, he told himself, would easily fit into just one of the tiny drawers. It was almost as if he brushed here the universal, all-encompassing viewpoint of eternity which is sometimes called God.
From that room he flashed into a busier one crowded with command tables, maps, charts, screens and tanks for three-dimensional viewing. On and in the latter were ever-changing scenes of catastrophe: landscapes and cities riven by earthquake, seared by fire, inundated by great waves and silent rises of water. He peered excitedly for a while, then it came to him with horror that this was his own planet Earth suffering tidal mutilation in the grip of the Wanderer’s mass — the Wanderer, which could turn gravity on and off as suited its purposes.
He wanted to stay and watch, or thought he did, but instead he was irresistibly hurried off through several walls into a chamber that was one great dark viewing tank with alien faces all around it, some with two eyes, some with three and some with eight. In the tank hung models of Earth and the Wanderer and a looping, swelling quarter-ring that was the remnants of Luna. Here and there, mostly clustering close to the two planets, were points of violet and yellow light which he guessed were spaceships.
The larger globes were the right distance apart — some thirty times their diameter — and Don could not tell whether they were replicas or three-dimensional projections. The illusion was so good that he felt he was drifting in space, with the weird alien faces replacing the constellations.
Then without warning other planets, green, gray, gold, some as strangely figured as the Wanderer, began to appear by ones and twos. Bright bolts of light that traveled with a curious slowness shot between them — radiation moving 186,000 miles a second, but slowed down to scale. There were miniscule explosions. Light-point spaceships moved in warring fleets. Then all the planets but Earth began to move about swiftly as if maneuvering in a battle.
But he never saw the outcome of the engagement, for the forces moving him through, the Wanderer began to work on him with greater urgency, as if he were nearing the end of his trip. For the first time he felt a pang of weariness.
The next three rooms he was hurried through were all viewing tanks with backgrounds velvet black except for the alien faces of the viewers. The first showed a swirled lens of bright points and clusters of light — a galaxy, certainly, probably the Milky Way.
The second room held a great swarm of tiny, soft, spherical and disk-shaped puffs of light spaced rather more than their own diameters apart There was something strange about the space in this tank — it seemed to curve back upon itself mysteriously, so that as he moved about everything changed more than it ought. Just before he was whirled on, Don guessed he was seeing the entire cosmos of star-islands: the totality, the universe.
His imagination began to wander sleepily, independently of his viewing. Phrases drifted through his mind: This artificial planet…the umbilicus of the cosmos…the central brain…the eternal eye…the book of the past…the womb and zygote of the future…transcendent as God, yet not God…
He returned to himself, or to his winging viewpoint, with a start, to realize that he was gazing into a great black viewing tank in which the cosmos he had just seen — it was recognizable by its mysteriously twisted shape — was only one small, pale puff of light floating alone. Then ghostlier light-puffs of other shapes and hues began to appear and vanish, some swiftly as a firefly’s flash, some lingering a while. Don wondered dreamily if these were other universes known to the beings of the Wanderer. Or perhaps only universes guessed at…sought…there was something hypothetical about their ghostliness and their swift vanishing…and stars and galaxies and universes are truly such unreal things, no more than the dim points of light that swim before one’s eyes before one sleeps…
Then the one bright cosmos began to dip and dart about like a leaf in a whirlwind, and he worried dreamily why that should be, since surely the universe is firm-based…and then the ghost cosmoses began to swirl too, hypothetically…
The last room Don traversed shocked him briefly awake as no other sight might have, and there seemed to be a moral to it, though his weary mind was unable to put it into words. It was a huge, worldlike room, similar to that of the harpies, with a furnace-red sky arching above a veldt dotted with rocks and tree clumps. Small hoofed animals more delicate than deer and armed with a single slim horn grazed fastidiously. Birds with ruby and topaz and emerald plumage and with elaborate combs and wattles flew low, frequently settling into the tall grass and the tree clumps as if in search of seeds and fruit.
Suddenly three birds whirred up at once from the grass, and the nearest group of unicorns held tremblingly still, sniffing the air and peering about fearfully, then took off with great bounds. Simultaneously there sprang from behind a rock a gray-barred tan felinoid otherwise resembling Don’s conductor. He raced after the unicorns, his long legs flashing, hurled himself on the last, brought it crashing down from mid-bound, grasped it by chest and chin, and dipped his jaws toward its throat.
A topaz bird winged past the nearest tree-clump and from it there sprang a green-furred felinoid, female by her smaller size and slightly different contours. She leaped with the soaring grace and almost incredible elevation of a ballet dancer executing a grand jetй. Her long arm flashed and barely brushed the bird, but three long talons deeply pricked its breast. Grasping it by the comb with her other hand, she carried it to her lips and bit expertly into its ruffling neck.
There was a redness on her dull olive lips and on the one long white fang showing as she looked across the yellow feathers straight at Don with her large and flowerlike, jade-irised eyes. It may have been coincidence, but he felt that she saw him. And as she sucked the blood, with the blood-red sky behind her, she smiled.