the man in black said carelessly. “Perchance to dream and that sort of thing.”
“What my bullets won’t do, mayhap my hands will,” the gunslinger said. His legs coiled with savage, splendid suddenness, and he flew across the fire at the other, arms outstretched. The man in black, smiling, swelled in his vision and then retreated down a long and echoing corridor. The world filled with the sound of sardonic laughter, he was falling, dying, sleeping.
He dreamed.
III
The universe was void. Nothing moved. Nothing was.
The gunslinger drifted, bemused.
“Let’s have a little light,” the voice of the man in black said nonchalantly, and there was light. The gunslinger thought in a detached way that light was pretty good.
“Now darkness overhead with stars in it. Water down below.”
It happened. He drifted over endless seas. Above, the stars twinkled endlessly, yet he saw none of the constellations which had guided him across his long life.
“Land,” the man in black invited, and there was; it heaved itself out of the water in endless, galvanic convulsions. It was red, arid, cracked and glazed with sterility. Volcanoes blurted endless magma like giant pimples on some ugly adolescent’s baseball head.
“Okay,” the man in black was saying. “That’s a start. Let’s have some plants. Trees. Grass and fields.”
There was. Dinosaurs rambled here and there, growling and whoofing and eating each other and getting stuck in bubbling, odiferous tarpits. Huge tropical rain-forests sprawled everywhere. Giant ferns waved at the sky with serrated leaves. Beetles with two heads crawled on some of them. All this the gunslinger saw. And yet he felt big.
“Now bring man,” the man in black said softly, but the gunslinger was falling . . . falling up. The horizon of this vast and fecund earth began to curve. Yes, they had all said it curved, his teacher Vannay had claimed it had been proved long before the world had moved on. But this—
Further and further, higher and higher. Continents took shape before his amazed eyes, and were obscured with clocksprings of clouds. The world’s atmosphere held it in a placental sac. And the sun, rising beyond the earth’s shoulder—
He cried out and threw an arm before his eyes.
“Let there be light!”
The voice no longer belonged to the man in black. It was gigantic, echoing. It filled space, and the spaces between space.
“Light!”
Falling, falling.
The sun shrank. A red planet stamped with canals whirled past him, two moons circling it furiously. Beyond this was a whirling belt of stones and a gigantic planet that seethed with gases, too huge to support itself, oblate in consequence. Further out was a ringed world that glittered like a precious gem within its engirdlement of icy spicules.
“Light! Let there be—”
Other worlds, one, two, three. Far beyond the last, one lonely ball of ice and rock twirled in dead darkness about a sun that glittered no brighter than a tarnished penny.
Beyond this, darkness.
“No,” the gunslinger said, and his word on it was flat and echoless in the black. It was darker than dark, blacker than black. Beside this, the darkest night of a man’s soul was as noonday, the darkness under the mountains a mere smudge on the face of Light. “No more. Please, no more now. No more—”
“LIGHT!”
“No more. No more, please—”
The stars themselves began to shrink. Whole nebulae drew together and became glowing smudges. The whole universe seemed to be drawing around him.
“Please no more no more no more—”
The voice of the man in black whispered silkily in his ear: “Then renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Tower. Go your way, gunslinger, and begin the long job of saving your soul.”
He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject:
“NEVER!”
“THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light. Consciousness had no chance of survival in that great glare, but before it perished, the gunslinger saw something clearly, something he believed to be of cosmic importance. He clutched it with agonized effort and then went deep, seeking refuge in himself before that light should blind his eyes and blast his sanity.
He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.
IV
It was still night—whether the same or another, he had no immediate way of knowing. He pushed himself up from where his demon spring at