“Because this is Crystalman’s world, and Surtur’s world is something quite different.”
“That’s queer, then,” said Polecrab.
“Since I’ve come out of that forest,” proceeded Maskull, talking half to himself, “a change has come over me, and I see things differently. Everything here looks much more solid and real in my eyes than in other places so much so that I can’t entertain the least doubt of its existence. It not only looks real, it is real—and on that I would stake my life.... But at the same time that it’s real, it is false.”
“Like a dream?”
“No—not at all like a dream, and that’s just what I want to explain. This world of yours—and perhaps of mine too, for that matter—doesn’t give me the slightest impression of a dream, or an illusion, or anything of that sort. I know it’s really here at this moment, and it’s exactly as we’re seeing it, you and I. Yet it’s false. It’s false in this sense, Polecrab. Side by side with it another world exists, and that other world is the true one, and this one is all false and deceitful, to the very core. And so it occurs to me that reality and falseness are two words for the same thing.”
“Perhaps there is such another world,” said Polecrab huskily. “But did that vision also seem real and false to you?”
“Very real, but not false then, for then I didn’t understand all this. But just because it was real, it couldn’t have been Surtur, who has no connection with reality.”
“Didn’t those drum taps sound real to you?”
“I had to hear them with my ears, and so they sounded real to me. Still, they were somehow different, and they certainly came from Surtur. If I didn’t hear them correctly, that was my fault and not his.”
Polecrab growled a little. “If Surtur chooses to speak to you in that fashion, it appears he’s trying to say something.”