Colossus and Crab Read Online Free PDF Page B

white fire less than a millimeter long. Other lines forked upwards from the two ends,, fanning out, certain of their path, meeting, interlocking, forming a web-thin structure, an intricate lacework delicate as a snow crystal, bright as sunlit ice.
    He watched in awe; saw it expanding with all the satisfying completeness and mathematical beauty of a Bach fugue - delicate, glittering, strong.
    The structure was complete, three meters tall, a meter wide at the top, before he realized its true form, a three-dimensional inverted pyramid resting on its millimeter base.
    With no evidence, but with utter certainty, Forbin knew that this was no balancing act: the structure was stable, not defying but free of earthly laws, in harmony with laws far beyond human understanding.
    He cried out in wild exhilaration. Bach filled his brain, living triumphantly before him in cold fire.
    Its function he could not remotely guess, but it was too grand, too majestic to be a pointless exercise. All sense of scale gone, he saw it could be a thousand meters - or kilometers - tall, a fitting dwelling for the unknowable gods… .
    And it was stable, springing from a base no bigger than a thumbnail.
    As he watched, all else forgotten, the structure slowly tilted.
    “No!” He jumped up, reaching out to save it.
    “No. Do not touch: watch.”
    Five degrees …
    He sank back, trembling, praying for the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
    Ten degrees… . The rate of inclination increased: fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, an utterly impossible angle. Beyond anything at that moment-his wife, the world itself-he wanted to save it.
    At thirty degrees the structure rested, still depending upon its tiny base. Forbin’s fears vanished. Less beautiful at that unnerving angle, it was even more fantastic. “Impossible!” He shook his head, although he believed in it totally, sure the image would be with him for the rest of his life. “Visual Bach!”
    “Yes,” said the voice. “Bach is the composer we most understand. He saw what might be as we see what might be. We know that structure to be perfectly possible, but we cannot build it.”
    “What a tragedy …” Forbin whispered, and meant it.
    “A tragedy, yes - but ours. Not necessarily yours.” The vision slowly faded.
    “Oh, never!” Already Forbin doubted his memory. “For both of us it is a dream.”
    Instantly the tilted structure reappeared.
    “Try to push it over. It will not harm you.”
    Hesitantly he approached the bright web; to touch it seemed sacrilege. He reached up, felt it icy cold on his skin. Gaining confidence, he pressed with the palm of his hand. Nothing happened. He pressed harder, less amazed by the stability of the pyramid than by the fact that he could feel it at all. One theory collapsed; he had suspected that “Forbin” and “Blake” and this ethereal object were all fantastic projections of an optical device, but the gossamer struts hurt his hand. To project an image into his mind was one thing; to add physical side-effects struck him as a much more improbable ability. And even if it was no more than a Martian projection for a human to see and feel, surely that was reality? Could a Martian idea be a concrete fact to man? Not for the first time, Forbin gave up.
    He stood back, panting with his exertions. For all the effect he had had, he might have been beating a steel girder with butterfly wings. He blinked in the returning sunlight. “What can I say - what can I say?” So many wonders in so short a time left his mind groping, blinded by their brilliance, but one conviction slowly emerged: no entity with the power to imagine anything so beautiful could be evil.
    “That - that marvel … I don’t understand: you say you cannot build it and suggest that given time, we may. Yes …” His mind wandered, thinking what sort of supermen they would be. “Yes.” He repeated with more decision, his thoughts reverting. “You say you cannot build it, but it is, it