Collected Short Fiction, page 275
Crudely conceived, then, entropy is the measure of chaos, confusion, dissipation, of spent and useless energy. As clocks run down and rain falls and coal burns and the sun shines and your car is braked to a stop and your eye reads this page, the entropy of the universe is being increased. All energy runs down a hall, up which, without the aid of something like Maxwell’s demon, it can never return.
Released Entropy
Part Two
Concluding a novel of scientific power
UP TO NOW:
For two full centuries of grim exile on Pyralonne, a frigid, sunless “runaway” planet two hundred thousand light years from the galaxy, the Gyro-Goneen expedition labored to make ready for the great experiment.
The leader was Seru Gyroc, acclaimed the greatest scientist of all interstellar mankind, whose supreme ambition was to master the Omega Effect, based on the tensors of his own discovery, and so control the direction of entropy increase.
With him was Ron Goneen, tall, bronzed captain general of the Galactic Patrol, the scarred veteran commander of the First Andromeda Expedition. It was in that far star cloud that he had taken from the temple of the warrior crystals, the wonderous Jewel of Dawn.
Captain Goneen had warned the Galactic Council of the peril in any tampering with the force of creation. When the protest failed, however, he promptly joined the expedition with his great kappa-field space cruiser, the “Silver Bird.”
Having fallen in love with Lethara—Seru’s beautiful daughter, born on Pyralonne—the space captain felt his old fear return. His last effort to stop the experiment failed, however—and his worst apprehension was realized.
For the other life, born under the strange conditions of the Omega Effect, forced Seru to release the entropy-reversing radiation upon all the universe. The result was mad chaos, horror and doom. Time was annihilated. Spinning incredibly in reverse, the galaxies shrank, grew swiftly dark, plunged together in a suddenly contracting space. “The universe is winding up again,” Seru explains. “All matter will be condensed again into a single super atom.” Seru Gyroc is strangely changed by the force he set free; he is suddenly old!
Venturing out of the insulated laboratory tower, amid the cold, black phantoms of the other life, Ron Goneen rescues Lethara from the wreck of the “Silver Bird.” But Seru tells him that only the three of them, out of all humanity, remain alive.
And they seem doomed to perish soon. “I have murdered mankind!” quavers the stricken scientist. “I have murdered the universe!”
IX.
RON GONEEN slept for a long time, but not without dreams. He thought that the armored tower, containing himself, Seru Gyroc and Lethara, was somehow cast loose from desolate Pyralonne. He thought that it was spinning end over end, forever, through an illimitable, starless chasm of frigid darkness. He thought that vampire hordes followed it—spinning, shapeless shadows of black flame, that sought to enter, to suck away their warmth, their lives, their bodies.
When at last he awoke—lying still dressed on the couch where he had flung himself when he came down from the laboratory, exhausted with fatigue and cold and the horror of universal doom—his body still had a dull, leaden numbness. He felt a lingering, vague nausea, as if that vertiginous dream had been half reality.
“Ron, dear, you are—are well?”
He sat up with a start of eager joy, for it was Lethara’s soft voice. She was standing beside his couch, with a tray of steaming food.
“Oh, my darling——”
The eager greeting stopped in his throat. For his clearing eyes had seen her face. For a shocked, bewildered moment she seemed a terrible stranger. Like her father, the girl had been—changed!
She was thinner. Her oval face was haggard, and it had an ominous bluish cast. Her lips were pale and dry. Her violet eyes were darker than they had been, and hollow. They were wide pools of horror nameless and unutterable. And her wavy golden hair had turned, like her father’s, completely white.
Ron Goneen lightly touched her hand, tried to conceal the shock on his face. He tried to make his deep voice gay. “How is the most beautiful woman?” She shook her white head, with no answering smile. “Father has told me I am the only woman,” she said. “Therefore, I must try to live—though I can feel the cold of death still in me.
“But do not say that I am beautiful. I know that I am changed. And I saw the dread in your eyes——”
“Nonsense, my darling!” He took the tray out of her quavering hands, set it down, and gathered her in his arms. He kissed her, and her lips were very cold. “I know you had a terrible experience outside,” he told her softly. “But you will get over it. You must! It means so much——”
“I know,” her dry voice said dully. “And I’ll try, because it means so much for the race to go on——”
He held her cold, trembling body closer to him. “Because it means so much for you to go on, my darling! You must get well, and laugh again.
You must forget——”
“I can never forget,” she said solemnly. “And I feel that something is dead in me—forever!” She clung to him for a moment, with a desperate, shuddering strength, and then pushed out of his arms. “You must eat, and then my father wants you in the laboratory.” She pushed the tray toward him.
“It was good of you to bring it,” he said. “But you must take care of yourself. Have you eaten?”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I wasn’t hungry.”
He picked her up in his great arms, carried her, laughingly protesting to her own bed, and made her lie down while he fixed her a hot drink. When she had sipped a part of it, he left her and climbed back to the room beneath the dome.
THE THIN, shattered frame of Sent Gyroc was still pacing its endless, tortured circuit about the wrecked apparatus. His whitened hair was wildly tangled, his hollow eyes red for want of rest.
“There’s no way?” Ron Goneen greeted him heavily. “No possible way?” His mighty, bronzed body stiffened suddenly; his scarred fists clenched. “We must find a way, Seru—for Lethara’s sake!”
The bleached head nodded. “I know. For the sake of mankind——”
“And for her own sake.” The space captain’s deep voice was low and solemn. “She is very ill, Seru. Those things of black fire came too near her. It’s too dark for her here—too cold! She needs the warm air and bright sunlight of a young, living world.
“This universe is dead, Seru. Life—our kind of life—has become an anomaly since entropy is reversed. And she feels the death. Perhaps it is the other life creeping into her!”
“We must escape—and very soon!”
“If we could escape!” quavered the hollow voice of the stricken scientist. “But there is nowhere to go. The Omega wave has spread ruin to the limits of our universe. There may be others: my mathematics indicates that probability. But even if other closed space-time continua exists, we have no gate, no key——” His thin shoulders shrugged hopelessly; he resumed the aimless walking.
Ron Goneen stood for a little time silent, staring at the scientist, his red-bearded face grimly desperate. His great hand reached slowly, absently, into his tunic, and brought out a half-inch bubble of silvery light.
“I wonder——” his deep voice grated huskily. “You say there could be—another universe?”
He tossed the shimmering droplet on his palm, caught it and tossed it again. His narrowed eyes stared down at it. Seru Gyroc stalked wearily by him, making no answer.
“I call this the Jewel of Dawn,” his deep voice rumbled. “It was the most sacred object of the Andromedans. They had told us something of it, before the massacre——”
“Eh?” Seru Gyroc had halted, suddenly listening.
“It was the heart of their barbaric religion,” said Ron Goneen. “They held that it was itself another universe—or at least the door to one. They believed that one day, when they had reached a certain level of perfection, all their race would be allowed to migrate into it.
“I shouldn’t have taken it,” he added, “but for their treacherous murder of half my men, and because I thought that carrying it would give us some protection.”
“What is it? Not just a pearl?”
“No,” said Ron Goneen. “It is harder, more perfectly round; and it emanates a soft, steady light. Eve never seen anything like it on any planet. I’ve never attempted to analyze it, because I didn’t want to destroy it.”
The dark, hollow eyes of Seru Gyroc were suddenly flaming. “Hard?” he whispered eagerly. “Perfect? Constant luminescence without excitation?” Trembling, his thin hand grasped for it. “It’s just possible—— The theory of interpenetrating space time manifolds——”
He dropped the jewel, fell on his knees to scramble for it furiously. Ron Goneen caught up its shimmer as it rolled away, returned it to him.
“——just possible,” he breathed, “that the Andromedans were right!”
X.
AS THE OLD MAN worked with trembling hands and feverish eyes at his tests upon the jewel, Ron Goneen again opened one of the shuttered ports to look from the laboratory tower.
All was darkness now. The last bluish ghosts of the contracting nebulae had vanished. The bleak, frigid landscape of Pyralonne, if still beneath them, had lost its eerie radiance. The black phantoms ruled supreme.
He shuddered, slammed the shutter. His senses reeled from the shock of an alien other being, without. Black tentacles of freezing flame, he knew, had sought to reach him through the port.
Numb again, trembling to a sense of overwhelming dread, he went back down the stair to where he had left Lethara sleeping. She lay very still. Her thin face, framed in her silver-white hair, looked terribly bleak and cold.
She shuddered in her sleep, as he watched. The leaden shadow of horror fell heavily on her face. Her pale lips parted, and out of them came a dry, gasping sob of utter fear.
“My poor, poor darling,” whispered Ron Goneen.
He went softly to her, smoothed her cold forehead with his palm, and took her cold, blue hand in his. The tiny, frightened ghost of a smile came then to her sleeping lips, and her hand clung to his fingers.
He left her sleeping more easily, and returned anxiously to the laboratory, where Seru Gyroc was still working feverishly over the stone from Andromeda.
“Well?” he gasped. “What have you found?”
“Very strange!” the old scientist quavered. “Perdurable. No wonder the Andromedans worshiped it! Its hardness seems perfect. Nothing will scratch it. X ray and electron diffraction patterns reveal no crystalline molecular structure—no molecules at all. Its surface is a perfect mirror; no radiation will penetrate it. It not affected by the cold of liquid hydrogen or the heat of the atomic furnace. It is not a conductor of electricity, nor permeable by a magnetic field.”
“Then,” demanded Ron Goneen, “what is it?”
“There is one possible explanation,” the old man said: “that the Andromedans were right! The negative result of all my experiments can mean only that it is walled off from our space—that it exists in its own closed continuum.”
“Another space?” Ron Goneen gasped eagerly. “Then is it possible—by any means at all—for us to enter it? To escape?”
The old man shook his head.
“Hardly. The existence of a universe of such dimensions is mathematically conceivable. Our own will doubtless contract to such a size, or smaller, since the reversal of entropy. If,” he added, “one may speak of the size of one universe in the scale of another!”
Again he shook his head.
“But each galaxy in such a universe would be no larger than one of the atoms of our bodies. How, then, could we enter it? Still,” he suddenly interrupted himself, “there is the Kardishon Effect! Contraction of size is theoretically possible, through electronic acceleration and energy compensation along the time axis.”
WEARILY, he shrugged.
“But actually, with our limited time—for the tower will not protect us much longer, before the insulation fails—or before we are crushed by the contraction of space outside——”
“You are the galaxy’s best scientist,” Ron Goneen urged him. “You are working to save mankind! You must!”
“Yes,” the old man said soberly. “We must try to save the seed of mankind from the horror that I have wrought.”
He gulped. “Yes, we must try—— But even if we could master the Kardishon Effect,” he objected, “we should require a complete ship, able to navigate empty space.”
“We have one of the Silver Bird’s life tubes here in the tower,” Ron Goneen reminded him. “It is supplied and equipped to voyage two hundred thousand light years. If we could install size-changing apparatus aboard it——”
Seru’s red, hollow eyes were staring at him, with a new light in them.
“There is a possibility——” he breathed huskily. “The barest possibility! The apparatus would consist of the Kardishon oscillator, transformers and field coils. The installation would be difficult.”
“I’m a fair technician,” said Ron Goneen. “Let’s get to work!”
“I can design the field coils,” Seru yielded, “and you can be installing them. But it will all be useless,” he warned, “unless I can solve the problem that floored Kardishon, in the oscillator. For all the matter that he tried to contract began to disintegrate, because the shrinking atoms became unstable.” He shook his head. “I don’t know——”
“We’ll try, anyhow!” said Ron Goneen.
“Until we die.”
The haggard scientist turned to a workbench, and began to sketch plans for the coils that were to take form under the unsuspected expertness of Ron Goneen’s big hands.
The life tube, sealed into a rectangular chamber in the base of the tower, was a small craft, not a hundred feet in length. Lethara—when at last she awoke and came down to where Ron was desperately at work wiring up the new coils—named it the Life of Man.
She seemed ill and depressed. Ron Goneen paused to fix food, which she could not eat, and made her lie down again, aboard—for she was unwilling to leave him to go back above.
The two men labored on almost without pause for food or rest. The big space captain knew that time was becoming very short. For into the tower was seeping a penetrating cold, a chill of halftangible horror, that defied all their lights and heaters.
And a time came when Ron’s task was almost done. He was inspecting the last connections, and Seru was still up in the laboratory, at work on the vital oscillator, when he heard Lethara scream.
He ran back to her little cabin, amidships, and found her sitting bolt upright in her bunk.
Her eyes were wide black pools of horror, her face ashen. Her dry voice was sobbing: “They’ve broken in! The others—the things of black fire! I can feel them. They have come for us. They want our warmth, our lives, our bodies. We must go, Ron! Go——”
He was trying to soothe her.
“We can’t go quite yet,” he told her. “The Kardishon apparatus isn’t finished, or tested——”
“Oh-h-h-h!” her thin, agonized scream cut in. “They’ve got my father. Ron——”
Her voice rose on his name to a shuddering wail of utter horror. She stiffened. Her skin queerly blue, she fell rigidly back on the couch.
Trembling to a sick chill, Ron Goneen knew that the other life, indeed, had entered the tower. And to his ears came the stricken shriek of Seru Gyroc—trapped outside the vessel!
XI.
RON GONEEN left the girl and ran to the air lock of the little vessel. A wall of bitter cold met him. The air in the long chamber glittered with crystals of frost. White rime was forming on the walls.
And his spine tingled to a chill more deadly than cold—to the instinctive, overwhelming dread of an alien presence: the other life of the reversed universe!
Numbed and sickened, still he didn’t hesitate. Seru, he knew, had been on the floor above, finishing the precious oscillator. Catching a deep breath, he plunged into that sea of frozen menace, ran up the steps toward the dome.
The invader, he knew suddenly, was in the laboratory. For a terrible, shrinking dread increased in him, until it took gritted teeth and all his will to mount each successive step.
A strange darkness filled the room beneath the dome, when at last he fought his way in. The lamps still shone, but their radiance had contracted to little feeble moons, outlined with ghostly blue.
Stumbling forward through that thick, frigid barrier of dark, Ron Goneen found the scientist sprawled on the floor. His stiffened body was shrouded in a dreadful aura of shimmering blue. Clutched in his lifeless fingers was the tiny, bright tube of the vital oscillator.
Ron Goneen picked up the rigid form. Before he could move with it, however, something came toward him out of that dense darkness. It was dark also, shapeless. It was nothing that he could see; it made no sound—yet he was horribly aware of it.
Numb and stiff, he reeled back from it. Carrying Seru, he staggered back down the stair and into the silvered hull of the Life of Man. Gasping with relief, he closed the valves.
The scientist was still living, although pinched and blue with cold. His face was a mask of strain and horror, his pulse very slow and weak. Ron Goneen covered him up in a bunk, then hastened to the generator room to install the oscillator.
As he finished the task, some little sound made him look up, and he voiced an involuntary cry of startled apprehension. For Seru Gyroc stood swaying before him, a very specter of dread. His white hair was loose and wild, his shrunken body bloodless and violently trembling. His dark eyes were dilated and glazed with uttermost dread.
