"Boy!" He murmured it. "I like the way that sounds—hearing you call me—boy!"
Brutar had risen erect. "You have told me a great deal, Rob. We shall be friends." He was eyeing me. "On Earth when we get there, I shall make you into a great man—a very powerful man. You would like that?"
Did he feel that my intelligence was so limited that he could bribe me thus crudely? I smiled.
"Oh, yes—I should like that. But I've told you so much, and you haven't told me anything. How did you first find our Earth? How did you get yourself into that Borderland, and beyond? You were the first to go, weren't you?"
"The first," he said proudly. "I discovered it—well, by accident. Shall I show you how? And what I am doing to take all my loyal followers there with me?"
"Yes." I agreed. "That is what I want."
He led us outside. Eo walked close by Bee. I saw now that the encampment was itself one tremendous hollow globe; on Earth we would have said that it had a diameter of at least a mile. Brutar explained it proudly. Here, in the void of Space, his organized workmen had spun this huge shell of thought-matter. It was tenuous; I had not known when we passed through it coming in. Yet it was visible; within it we gazed at its interior surface. It glowed with a very pale dull light.
Upon this concave slope, in the foreground near us, were a variety of globes—small habitations for the workers. Paths ran between and over them. Further away, other larger globes glowed as though translucent, with light inside. Beyond them was a shimmering white lake—water or mist. Higher up—in the distance where the concave surface extended upward and swept back over our heads—was what seemed like dark soil. Things were growing there in orderly rows—a gigantic concave field of plants. It was dim off there, and so far above us that I could not make them out plainly.
Again, close at hand, just beyond the village of globes, was an enclosure possibly a thousand feet across. Movement was there—busy workers moving in the artificial glow of strings of lights. Vague, shifting shadows—grey shapes of men, from which the lights cast monstrous grey shadows as they moved. It seemed a dim inferno of strange industry incomprehensible.... Brutar led us toward it.
"We built all this," he said; and his gesture encompassed the entire inner void within that glowing tenuous shell. "We built and poised this here in Space. My followers have forsaken their homes to join me here. Soon we will go to your Earth-realm.... Some of us often go out there now—into that Borderland—to test our power."