Chapter VI

Dead. Dead. No bodily sensations. No _being_. But still thought. The individuality of Eldon Carmichael looked without eyes, listened without ears. It was absolutely, utterly alone in _nothingness_. Nothing but terrible _aloneness_.

But something--someone--had said, "Call me." What? Whom? Shreds of memory began to coalesce.

"Krasna!" The individuality of Eldon Carmichael shouted without lungs or mouth. "Krasna!"

The nothingness was no longer quite so empty. A thought brushed his.

"Eldon? Where?"

"Here!"

"Think of your shape!" a thought commanded.

The individuality of Eldon Carmichael thought. Memory shreds were coagulating to remind him he had once had a body. This was not death. It was something else.

"Think of me--help me _form_!" The thought-appeal was urgent but unfrightened. "I can't alone."

"Krasna?" He sent out the wordless question.

"Yes!"

He remembered her as he had watched her bathing in the warm pool that flowed through her home. And then he could see her floating in nothingness beside him, tenuous at first, then solidifying. He saw her with a new three-dimensional clarity and depth, as though with two eyes. Instinctively he reached toward her--and his left hand clasped her right.

Krasna looked down at herself, at the crescent-shaped scar marring her loveliness, and winced.

"Even here I must bear that," her thought reached him. "Until Sasso is no more."

Confused memories were returning now, bringing horror of this unknown emptiness.

And then Krasna's thoughts were flowing around him protectively, soothingly--but not in pity. And her thoughts brought understanding.

They were in the Thin World, a--place--outside the more solid worlds. Here only thought had actuality. Their bodies here were nothing but thought-projections. And here they must remain until the Chamber had had its way with their torn, tortured _real_ bodies, healing them. For such were the unique powers of the Chamber.

"But my arm? And my eye?" Eldon asked.

"You forgot you had lost them. Here you are as you think you are. And I--"

"Exactly as I have dreamed." The thought left Eldon's mind before it could be altered by his loyalty to Margaret and his desire to return to Earth.

Krasna glanced at him sharply, but she seemed not displeased. And there was gratitude in her thoughts. Gratitude and surprised admiration for the way he had come to her rescue without thought of his own safety.

"We must stay away from our actual bodies long enough but not too long," she told him. "Otherwise we could not return at all."

She read his questioning thoughts. "No. A Vardan mind can not take knowledge of the Thin World back. I can remember almost nothing of the time I was here after escaping the Faith.

"But you, with your Closed World brain, can perhaps do what I can not."

With his new knowledge Eldon understood also that those crystalline capsules in the gross grey carcasses were the real essence of the Luvans. The bodies in which they had clothed themselves to live in Varda had been purely artificial.

"I learned the secret of the Luvans in the slave pits of the Faith." Krasna's thoughts grew grim and bleak as she remembered the things to which she had been subjected there. Vardan memories could be carried into the Thin World, though not back again.

Eldon's thought-body drew hers close as they floated side by side in limbo, drew her to him comfortingly and protectingly to thrust those memories aside. He thought she should be soft and warm to touch--and she was.

She pulled away--after a time that could have been either a moment or an age--with a tinkling laugh and a change of mood.

"Time here is _different_ and it will seem long before we can return," her mind said. "Let us build a world to our own hearts' desires and live there until--until you can destroy Sasso and the Faith."

"But--"

She ignored his protest.

"I will go back to the Chamber occasionally--it will be necessary--but if you with your tenacious Earth mind went it would be disastrous."

"Understand this once and for all," he warned her. "If ever I can return to my own Earth I shall do so. I am not your marvelous El-ve-don, and I have no intention of fighting this thing you call Sasso. Those Luvans were bad enough."

Krasna frowned. Then her look of disappointment gave place to a knowing smile.

There was a hint of a surprising idea. Just the faintest sort of hint--and then she closed her mind, half laughingly and half in seriousness. But tightly.

"Let's build our world," she said.

* * * * *

It was a Godlike sensation to _think_ a world. It changed with their thoughts, part Earth, part Varda, and part the solidification of the non-existent lands of dreams. There were groves, streams, mountains, plains. There were towns too, but these could be seen only dimly, indistinct in the distance, the men and women in them tiny figures without individuality. Neither Krasna nor Eldon had formulated their ideas for an inhabited utopia concretely enough to fill in the details.

Krasna created for herself a wardrobe of wonderful gowns every fold of which draped in a perfection of beauty, and jewels of kaleidoscopic inner fires that shifted with her mood. After her hunted forest life in Varda she indulged her fancies to the fullest.

Eldon built a laboratory. He lavished concentrated attention upon it--and then it failed to give him the satisfaction he had expected. For he did not have to work to find solutions. He _knew_. Even the mysterious bound charges yielded up their secrets in minutest detail, and when he discovered his Earth theorizing about the close connection between interacting bound charges and life itself had been on the right track he felt no surprise. The experimental equipment he designed was worse than useless, answering so perfectly to his thoughts that he could make the needles of his meters swing by merely _willing_ it. He gathered almost limitless knowledge.

Krasna asked about life on Earth, and occasionally Eldon created Earth scenes for her. Once he built a dream automobile, unhampered by the structural limitations of Earth materials, and any number of miles of broad highway. Everything but the traffic. Krasna was delighted at first, amused by the manually operated controls, but then she saddened as she remembered that once Varda had had its own system of roads. So Eldon erased the perfect automobile and perfect highway from existence.

Krasna looked at him peculiarly. She seemed almost afraid of him, so deep was her awe.

"You--you are most certainly El-ve-don!" she whispered. "Only El-ve-don could know how to do such a thing. My people will be grateful to you forever when you save us from Sasso."

Irrational anger stirred within him at her assumption. "No! I shall return to Earth as soon as I can--if I can. I am not El-ve-don."

Krasna was shocked. "Then some day Sasso will come to Earth."

Eldon shrugged, rejecting the thought, his mind still unwilling to believe in the very existence of Sasso.

Then it was time for her to visit the Chamber. Her thought-body _thinned out_, vanished.

Eldon found their private world dreary and dead without her. With the bright, vital waves of her personality missing there was no joy. He grew intolerably lonely, anxious for her return.

When she reappeared everything was right again in their self-created world. The news she brought was mixed. Their bodies were repairing satisfactorily, she reported, but outside the Chamber there was chaos and steadily deepening defeat for the Forest People. Many had been captured--she shuddered with horror--while others more fortunate had been killed.

Her eagerness to leave their dream world communicated itself to Eldon, but their reasoning was different. She was dedicated to the struggle against Sasso. He hoped with his newfound knowledge to escape the brutalities of Varda and return to old familiar Earth.

But the time was not yet.

Once more she went away and once more she returned, this time almost at once. "Eldon!" she wailed even as she materialized. "We must go back now!"

"Why?" he demanded.

"Because The Night approaches. Two Earth minds aiding the Faith have disturbed the balance. My people can not hold the Gateway much longer."

"But--?"

"If we don't we shall be lost here forever!"

Suddenly Eldon's homesick longing for Earth gave way to hesitation. Here he was whole, not a cripple. There--

But Krasna's absences had shown him that to be alone for all eternity on this self-created world would be unendurable. Even a disembodied brain could--would--go mad from loneliness. And there was Margaret, a prisoner of the Faith. He had no choice.

"All right," he agreed reluctantly.

"Now!"

Instinctively he knew the way.

"Eldon! El-ve-don! Stay near me!" He sensed Krasna's appeal even as their thought-world crumbled back into the featureless opacity of limbo, and he responded amid the _nothingness_.