Dr. Wooden grinned and sat on the edge of the sandstone tabletop. He lighted a cigarette himself, saying, "Tell me."
Jonathan told him. And then he said, "It seems understandable enough, really. Those powers I possess. What are they but an innate adaptability to environment. And isn't that the true goal of Nature?
"The environment is what destroys, is what weakens, is what kills. Call it a blast furnace. Call it disease. Call it a clawing tiger. It is, nevertheless, our environment: temporary or permanent. To survive that, man must be immortal, in a physical sense. In the sense that he possesses in himself all the necessary attributes to enable him to overcome that environment. That way lies immortality."
Dr. Wooden regarded the glowing tip of his cigarette. He said, "That's clear enough. It is fantastic, but who knows what changes one million or two million years will bring in man. Lord knows, it brought a lot of changes on Earth itself! Now, about the flames—"
Jonathan crushed out his cigarette.
"They were the emanations from the calcatryte. I realized that eventually. It stood to reason. It had to be something alien to a universe where light curves. Something that either ate up matter or made it invisible or opened a door for it to leak out somewhere, into nothingness.
"Calcatryte gives off straight light, so powerful that it eats through metal. It could as easily eat through dirt and rock, through the moon of a planet, through a planet itself. Through the universe, in short. In a universe based on curving light, that unbendable light was an anomaly. It ate up our universe, or started to."
"Again, clear enough. It's reasonable, and possible. But when you went into the shadows and passed through them—you emerged here in my laboratory. But my laboratory is billions upon billions of miles from Neeoorna."
Jonathan grunted, "In terms of ordinary space, yes. I passed through hyperspace."
"That's a mathematical concept."