Fear that man

wash of lavender…
        He liked to pick out patterns in the explosions of color, choose and name them as a young boy might do with clouds seen from a green grass-covered hill in summer.
         A dragon’s mouth holding the broken body of an amber… amber… amber knight…
        Alexander Breadloaf III wondered whether his father had sat like this, watching the patterns and trying to make something of them. It was a seeking after order, certainly, that was the purpose of watching them. Had his father sat, his great leonine head bowed in contemplation, his heavy brows run together from the forehead-wrinkling concentration? Had he laced his thick fingers behind his waterfall of white hair and watched-actually studied-the Prisoner of the Shield, as the family had come to speak of it?
        He doubted it. His father had been a man of hard work and strenuous action. He had built his father’s small fortune into a very large fortune, an almost incalculable sum of money. When his engineers accidently stumbled across the Shield while looking for a non-matter force for construction purposes, when they discovered, to their horror, what lay beyond. The old man took the practical angle. He knew there was a fortune to be made here, more than his already formidable masses of wealth. He had only to enslave the powers already trapped behind the Shield and turn them to work for him. The Shield was maintained. But the powers could never be enslaved. To agree to slavery, the slave must have fear of his master. There was no fear in the Prisoner. Absolutely none.
         Brilliant flashes of white rippled like fish through a sudden sea of smoky burgundy…
        His heart thudded at the bright light, even though he knew the Shield was impenetrable. Take one molecule and expand it. Expand it some more. Make it bigger and bigger and bigger-but don’t disturb its natural particle balance. You have a Shield. It will hold back anything, stand against even nuclear power of the highest magnitude. But you also have a doorway into a higher dimension. A barred doorway. No, really more like an unbreakable window. But that window turns the higher dimension into a prison, squeezes it into a confined space (a law of opposites which equalizes the pressure created by the expanding first molecule). The higher dimension is then bound within the tiny limits. It and its inhabitants are trapped, unable to move or to get out.
         Brilliant white on yellow like cat’s-eye marbles…
        No, his father had never sat here like this. He was too practical for melancholia. Along about the second hundred years of the Prisoner’s confinement, the old fellow had realized-probably with a great deal of bitterness-he could never enslave it and demand things of it. And as the years passed he came to maintain the Shield only because to let it go off would mean the end of his family and possibly all human life. The Prisoner would be seeking revenge-an omnipotent, terrible revenge of finality. By the days of Alexander the Third, this fear of the Prisoner had been compounded by a feeling of moral obligation. The sanity and progress of the empire depended on keeping the Prisoner imprisoned. Always, in the rear of his mind, was the fear that the thing would escape. Sometimes that fear surged to the fore. Times like this. He wanted to run into the streets and scream about the charge behind the Shield. But the Breadloafs had done this thing, had trapped this beast. It would be up to them to watch it for all eternity. And perhaps beyond.
        Finally, when watching was not quite enough, Alexander walked to the Shield, stood with a hand upon the coursing energy. “How did you,” he said at length to the thing beyond, “become like this?”
        It could only thought-speak to him when he was touching the Shield. Even then, the words were tiny and distant: Letmeout, letmeout …
        “How did you become like this?”
         Letmeout, letmeout, letmeout …
        That was its constant cry. Sometimes there were bloodcurdling threats. But he knew-and it knew-that the threats could not be carried out. Not as long as the Shield was there. It would never answer his question: “How did you become like this?” Not today. It had answered previously, but only when it thought it had something to gain.
        “How did you become like this?”
        And it had said: I have always been like this…
        
        On hydro-beds, reclining, they