Dawn of the Demigods

by Raymond Z. Gallun

Then I saw a hole, like a tiny cigarette burn, at the fabric-and-wire elbow joint of my armor's left arm.

"Scharber! Bowhart!" I yelled. It was a thin wheeze. I wished that they knew more about Doc's work so they could help us. My final awareness was of the rush of their footsteps.

Time became timeless. Then I had a sense of struggling upward toward light. The effort was mental. A minute might have passed, or a year. I had a body which seemed to turn lightly on a mattress of coarse sticks. I felt like myself, clothed in real flesh. The light around me might have been diffused sunshine, and I saw colors, the familiar ones, plus what might be the indescribable paleness of ultra-violet, unknown to man as himself, and another nameless hue that perhaps was the sensory effect of electronic vision.

I didn't fully guess all this at once; but its ghost was in the back of my mind, and at the edge of panic.

I had sat up easily. I realized that I was still in the region of The Small. Once experiencing that environment denies any failure to recognize it later. Oh, there was the roughness of the glassy walls of the room, pleasingly decorated with geometric patterns like those of old tiles brought back to Earth from the asteroid belt. But I refer more to the insecure sense of buoyancy, of ease with which one might float in the air or recline upon it, after a tiny push at the floor. It is a feeling quite apart from the weightlessness experienced in space; and though there was certainly very little gravity here, too, the difference remained palpable. And now I even felt a tingling in my skin—the impact of molecules, perhaps, as they tried to lift and carry me away.

My body seemed to conform to such a dimensional plane. It was me with some details blurred or omitted. I was clad in stiff imitations of the slacks and shirt I had worn inside my space armor. My hands, rough in texture, lacked the fine hairs, as if they had been left out in a process of transformation. Was the stiff, wirelike hair on my head still black? I fumbled at my face. The nose, large jaw, and brow, seemed the same, except for a certain shortness and roundness, as in a doll-like simulacra. Corresponding to this was the length of lashes around my eyes—or had electronic sense-organs been added, necessary here for close vision?

Again I looked around the room. One wall was absent. But the square left for ventilation was crossed by interwoven diagonals—bars which must have been incredibly fine wire from another viewpoint.

Beyond this barrier was an egg-shaped chamber, so huge to my present minuteness that it was like a mountain valley, its sides curving up in shade and lushness; though through its vitreous, natural roof, light streamed. Everywhere, bright green foliage peeped over garden walls. Sometimes it was shaggy and filamented, sometimes massy and spheroidal on thin stalks. Along streets rising in angular charm, were geometric masses in pastel tints, some unknown to man, before. There were cubes, pyramids, even spheres—buildings, obviously—yet of such simple oddity that a child might have designed them.

Water did not lie flat as in a lake, but gathered in great glistening dewdrops, burying a house or hill fantastically, but with startling beauty.

But all this moved with the daily life of a teeming civilization—living, manufacturing, buying and selling in the market place. The air was full of craggy shapes, some propelling themselves with arm and leg movement, others using jet rods. High on a slope there was a continuous electrical flicker, a bluish spark. Perhaps the furnace of a metallurgical process.