Destiny Times Three

By FRITZ LEIBER, Jr.

Illustrated by Orban

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction March, April 1945. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I.

In ghostly, shivering streamers of green and blue, like northern lights, the closing hues of the fourth Hoderson symchromy, called "the Yggdrasil," shuddered down toward visual silence. Once more the ancient myth, antedating even the Dawn Civilization, had been told—of the tree of life with its roots in heaven and hell and the land of the frost giants, and serpents gnawing at those roots and the gods fighting to preserve it. Transmuted into significant color by Hoderson's genius, interpreted by the world's greatest color instrumentalists, the primeval legend of cosmic dread and rottenness and mystery, of wheels within cosmic wheels, had once more enthralled its beholders.

In the grip of an unearthly excitement, Thorn crouched forward, one hand jammed against the grassy earth beyond his outspread cloak. The lean wrist shook. It burst upon him, as never before, how the Yggdrasil legend paralleled the hypothesis which Clawly and he were going to present later this night to the World Executive Committee.

More roots of reality than one, all right, and worse than serpents gnawing, if that hypothesis were true.

And no gods to oppose them—only two fumbling, overmatched men.

Thorn stole a glance at the audience scattered across the hillside. The upturned faces of utopia's sane, healthy citizenry seemed bloodless and cruel and infinitely alien. Like masks. Thorn shuddered.

A dark, stooped figure slipped between him and Clawly. In the last dying upflare of the symchromy—the last wan lightning stroke as the storm called life departed from the universe—Thorn made out a majestic, ancient face shadowed by a black hood. Its age put him in mind of a fancy he had once heard someone advance, presumably in jest—that a few men of the Dawn Civilization's twentieth century had somehow secretly survived into the present. The stranger and Clawly seemed to be conversing in 

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