Collected Short Fiction, page 517
Absently, he wished for Ironsmith’s computing section, to check his answers for him. But he hadn’t even a slide rule, or a scratch pad to jot his new equations on. He had nothing at all, and he didn’t even dare to move.
He lay still, and roved through atoms and suns.
It wasn’t hope which urged him—not consciously—for he thought that hope was dead. He had yielded himself to the humanoids, and relaxed all resistance. He just lay there, and let his brain seek relief in the familiar ways of science.
And he found the answer to that ancient riddle.
It was a simple equation, which related electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic and paraphysical forces, to explain the structure and stability of the atom. It all seemed obvious, and he wondered why it hadn’t come to him before.
The sheer mathematical beauty of it brought him a glow of pleasure. For it was basic. The keystone, he thought, that supported all the ordered splendor of the universe. The transformations of that equation, he knew, would explain the origins of atoms and the universe, the attraction of suns and the dispersion of galaxies, the dark paradox of time and the birth of life, and even the evolution and function of mind.
He lay quite relaxed on the hard cot, lost in the elemental grandeur of the concept. He had forgotten the gray-walled cage around him, and the sleepless keeper watching him, and the unpleasant fact that he would soon become an experimental specimen—until the black machine softly touched his arm.
“At your service, sir,” it purred. “We’re ready now—”
And then he was no longer in the cage.
XXV.
He wasn’t even on Wing IV.
He stood on a flat gravel bed, at the bottom of a shallow dry watercourse. On his left were low cliffs, apparently formed by an outcropping ridge of dark ancient granite, against which the stream had sometime cut. Far away, on his right, long-eroded hills lifted low and bare and dead beyond the wide black valley of the vanished river.
It was night, and cruelly cold. The sky above the low black cliffs and the far black hills was utterly cloudless, and yet strangely dark. The most of it was a dead and utter black, scattered with a few tiny oval blobs of misty light. Before him, however, that dark valley was arched with a high tilted curve of pale white splendor. It was a tall, leaning dome of luminous white mist, bright with diamond atoms.
That cruel cold took his breath and seared his skin—for he stood barefoot on the hard, frozen gravel, clad only in the thin gray pajamas he had worn to bed. For a moment he stood shivering, utterly bewildered. Then he felt a child’s small hand, tugging anxiously at his fingers.
“Oh, Dr. Claypool!”
He looked down and found Dawn Hall beside him on the river-worn gravel. She was no longer a creature of the grid. For her huge dark eyes could see again, and that cold smile of far oblivion was gone. She was shivering and afraid.
“It’s so awful cold!” she said. “Oh, please—what can we do?”
“I don’t know,” he told her blankly. “I don’t even know where we are.”
He found that he couldn’t speak, because that dreadful empty cold had taken all his breath. His throat was dry and his lungs were burning and his lips too stiff to move. He made no sound—and heard none, for this dark world was utterly dead. Vet somehow she understood.
“But I know,” she told him—and then he realized that he hadn’t heard her actual voice at all. “ ’Cause this is where Mr. White used to send me to pick up nuggets for him. I used to hurry back with them to the cave, before I got too awful cold. But now we can’t go there again, ’cause the black things would catch us.”
Her tight fingers were icy on his own.
“Oh, where can we go?”
Claypool swayed to a stunned understanding. He remembered those nuggets of alluvial palladium, that Dawn had brought to White from some far-off, airless, sunless planet, cold to the absolute zero. He stared around him again, numbed with wonderment.
Now he understood the starless blackness of the unclouded sky, and the merciless still cold, and the diamond-dusted splendor of that tilted arch across the black and barren valley. For they were lost, somehow, on this wandering world beyond the Galaxy.
Those tiny oval blots against the dead and empty dark were other island universes, remote beyond knowledge. And that leaning dome of luminous mist was the edge of their own Galaxy, seen with light which must have left its dust of suns a long thousand centuries before the first man ever dreamed of voyaging away from the mother planet into the silent seas of space.
“It’s so awful cold,” the frightened child was sobbing again. “I can help us for a little while, but then what can we do?”
Blankly, Claypool shook his head. It must have taken a billion years, he thought, for this lost atom to drift so far through the extra-galactic dark. It must have been time beyond imagining since some vanished sun had warmed these old black hills, and vanished waters had washed this frozen gravel.
This world was dead, and no day would ever break the black, silvered splendor of this cruel, soundless night. Nothing could live here long. He remembered the crackling frost which caked Dawn’s nuggets in the air of the cavern. Nothing could live at the absolute zero.
His hands were empty and his weak knee throbbed and the rough gravel burned the soles of his feet. He peered around him hopelessly, at the low frowning cliffs and the bare, forbidding hills. He knew they would find no aid or comfort here.
“I don’t even know how we got here,” he told the child. “I don’t know anything to do.”
She stood straight and tiny in that old leather coat, too large for her, with the bit of scarlet ribbon stiffly frozen in her black hair. Her dark eyes looked at him, full of solemn trust and pleading.
“Can I help you?” he begged. “Can you tell me how to help you?” But she only shook her head, shivering and afraid.
She was keeping them bath alive, he knew. White had speculated on the unconscious arts which enabled her to live—a little while—in this airless cold. She had adapted to it, somehow, paraphysically. But there was nothing she could tell him, and no help that he could give.
He felt the silent fangs of cold, stabbing through his flesh. His throat burned, and his empty lungs. But he could still feel Dawn’s stiff tiny fingers, clutching desperately at his hand. His blurring eyes could see her shifting uncomfortably back and forth, to lift one bare foot and then the other a Wily from the searing gravel.
And he forgot himself.
He bent to pick her up, and his bad leg buckled. He knelt on the gravel, and lifted her. He held her against him, and tried to shield her with his arms. He thought there was nothing else that he could do.
He could feel her desperate tension, but he knew no way to share her burden. Abruptly she swayed against him, shuddering, and then he felt the cold grasp at them again, with a new and implacable fury. Her strength was ebbing, and he felt an infinite compassion.
Then she stirred feebly in his stiff arms.
“The door!” She tried to point. “There—”
Turning painfully where he knelt, he saw a faint gleaming something above the ragged rim of the low black cliffs. He blinked his dimming eyes, and made out the smooth curve of a transparent cupola there, washed with the pale radiance of the far Galaxy.
Below that tiny dome, he saw a green light burning. He shook his head stiffly, and stared again. It was a light! Glistening on polished metal surfaces, it shone through a round metal doorway in the black hostile face of the ancient cliffs.
He merely gaped at it, mistrusting his own failing senses. For his eyes were smarting and bleared, and a painful roaring was increasing in his ears, and a frosty numbness grasped him. For a long billion years, he thought, nothing could have lived to make a light on this dark world. And he knew the cupola and the doorway hadn’t been there, when he first saw the water-worn cliffs.
“Please!” Dawn sobbed faintly. “Please hurry—”
He didn’t wait to wonder any longer. He swayed laboriously to his feet, and picked her up again. His feet no longer hurt, and even the pain in his knee was numbed, but his limbs seemed stiff and dead. He toiled across the hard black gravel, toward that green-lit opening. Three times he fell, and kept the child in his arms, and came up again. Slow and stiff and clumsy, like a machine running down, he went on again. And he came to the shining metal threshold.
Stumbling into that narrow metal chamber, he saw that it must be an air lock. His painful, blurring eyes found a row of buttons. One glowed dimly green. He punched at it stiffly, with a finger that had no feeling left, and a massive valve slid shut behind them.
Air screamed in about them, a warm and kindly hurricane. He filled his burning lungs again, and breathed. His dry, stinging eyes began to clear, and that roaring died out of his ears, and his stiffened feet began to feel the good warmth of the floor.
Still he held Dawn in his arms. She was very cold, very limp and still. He caught her small blue wrist, and found no pulse that he could feel. But then she shuddered convulsively, and drew a long sighing breath. Her dark eyes open, seeing again, full of a warm devotion.
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Claypool!”
Her clear treble voice was her own again, and now he could hear the grave sweetness of it. The smile on her thin face was human, now, relaxed and happy.
“I think Mr. White would say you’re very, very good!”
He set her down on the warm floor beside him and looked about him with a heightened bewilderment. Any shelter for them, on this long-dead wanderer of the dark, had seemed unbelievably improbable, and now he began to notice singular things about this strangely convenient haven.
Certainly it wasn’t a billion years old.
The warm air had a faint, familiar smell of new paint. The buttons which worked the valves were made of the latest translucent synthetic—and neatly marked with words that he could read. Riveted to the control case of the automatic mechanism was the familiar name plate of the Acme Engineering Corporation—a small firm which had supplied certain machinings for the neutrino search tubes of Project Lookout.
Experimentally, he pushed a button marked INNER VALVE—TO OPEN. Something hummed obediently, inside the case. An amber light flashed, and a warning gong whirred. Then another heavy wedge of polished steel slid down, and let them into the shelter.
Voiceless with a baffled astonishment, Claypool took the breathless child by the hand, and they went on to explore this curious haven. A tunnel led them back into the rock. It was lined with plates of smoothly welded metal, painted with the same shades of cream and gray that Claypool had chosen for his own office, at Starmont. The soft illumination came from fluorescent fixtures—which bore the familiar trade-mark of United Electric.
Doors were spaced along the tunnel, all fitted with knobs that he could turn instead of concealed relays. Claypool peered into the rooms behind them, shaken with a mounting bewilderment.
The first room housed a power plant. A small rotary convertor hummed silently beside a bank of transformers, and a stand-by waited silently. He looked for the generator, and caught, his breath. For all the current seemed to come from one small cell, with a name plate which read: Starmont Rhodomagnetic Research Foundation.
That was impossible. Claypool blinked at it, and shook his head. Once he had dreamed of establishing a nonprofit foundation, to develop the wonders of rhodomagnetics for the benefit of man. But the harsh demands of military security had nipped his hopes, and the destructive science of Project Thunderbolt had taken all his time.
Another room was a kitchen—oddly like Ruth’s, in their house at Starmont. The electric range and the refrigerator were the same white, shiny United Electric models. The cans and cartons of food on the shelves were all bright with the labels of standard brands.
He found a room for himself, and one for Dawn. The little table beside his bed was stacked with a dozen of his favorite books—but none that he hadn’t read. His bathroom was thoughtfully supplied with his favorite brands of soap and toothpaste.
At the end of the tunnel, a narrow stair led upward. They climbed it, and came up into the crystal-domed cupola above the ancient granite outcrop. Claypool stared out through the curving panels, chilled with an awed perplexity.
Outside the warm comfort of the shelter, that frozen landscape lay unchanged. The cruel sky was black and strange above. The high curve of the Galaxy stood like a leaning plume of luminous dust beyond that barren, empty valley where sometime water must have run; and the pale frosty light of it fell faint and cold on the black cliffs, and the black eroded hills beyond.
Leaning on a little table at the center of the floor, to ease his weary knee, Claypool stood a long time staring at that tall splendid arch of silver-and-diamond dust. The cold and the loneliness of this starless world took hold of him again, and he shuddered a little. Dawn caught his hand, whispering anxiously:
“Is it something very bad?”
He didn’t want to frighten her, and he smiled down at her thin, apprehensive face with the best assurance he could find.
“Nothing bad,” he said. “I just don’t understand it. I don’t quite know how we got here—so far from home that all the stars we ever saw are lost in that cloud, yonder.” He peered at her solemn face. “Did you bring us, Dawn?”
She shook her head.
“And I don’t understand this place in the rock. At first it wasn’t here, and then it was. Everything looks as if it had been built by men—from our own world. But I don’t think any men ever lived here.”
She gaped at him, as if amazed. “I just don’t get it,” he said. “Everything is so—familiar. The books I like to read, and the kind of toothpaste I use, and even a bottle of the capsules I used to take for indigestion. The bottle has my doctor’s name on it, and even the right prescription number!” Dawn frowned at him, perplexed as he was.
“Don’t you ’member?” she whispered softly. “Don’t you know?” He blinked at her, abruptly voiceless.
“It’s kind of funny you don’t ’member,” she said gravely, “ ’cause you did it all. You found me, and took me away from that awful place, where the black things have Mr. White and poor Mr. Graystone and poor Mr. Overstreet and poor little Mr. Lucky. All I did was show you where to come—fat away from all the black things.”
He merely stared at her, stunned.
“And then you made all this place, after we came,” she said. “You made it all, while we waited out there in the cold.” She nodded toward the dark alley. “It’s a pity you don’t ’member, ’cause you could be awful good at paraphysics.”
XXVI.
Claypool looked down at his hands, and flexed them unbelievingly. They were small wiry hands, sensitive and competent, and they had been useful to him once. Since he had seen the beautiful, tapered black hands of the humanoids, however, they seemed clumsy and weak and slow. Now his fingers still ached a little from the cold, and his knuckles were still dark-scabbed where he had peeled them, awkwardly trying to install the new grid sections. He stared at his hands, and his knobby fists clenched uselessly.
Dawn seemed to read his perplexity and doubt.
“You didn’t use your hands, at all,” she told him solemnly, “ ’cause you were out there, waiting with me in the cold. You did it with your mind. Don’t you ’member now?”
But Claypool didn’t remember.
Dazedly, he peered around the little cupola. The little table, lit from a shaded fixture, was like one he had used at Starmont. Neatly arranged on it were scratch pads and sharpened pencils, a slide rule, and several technical handbooks—one of them, listing tables of rhodomagnetic constants and coefficients, was by W. Claypool.
The back of his neck prickled uncomfortably.
“That’s my name,” he whispered. “Those are values I had worked out. But that book was never printed. The censorship. I don’t see how—”
His voice fell away into a chasm of wonder, as dark as the dead night above.
“You did it with your mind,” Dawn insisted softly. “You did it with paraphysics, like Mr. White taught me how to change potassium atoms and stop the black things. Only I think you can change any atom, and let it go into energy, and then make the energy right back into any other atom. I think you know more about paraphysics than even Mr. White—if only you could ’member.”
Claypool stood speechless, unbelieving.
“ ’Cause I saw you,” she said. “I watched you cut out this place, and make the rock into other things, and build it all up ready for us. I saw this window-thing come up, and the door open, and the green light shine—all because you made it. An’ I’m glad you did. ’cause I was getting cold!”
Claypool stood peering at a thermostat in front of the ventilator register beside the stair. It was a good copy of one in the unused nursery of the house he and Ruth had built at Starmont, so long ago. His narrow shoulders shrugged uneasily.
“I can see I must have made it,” he admitted, “because everything is somehow copied from something in my own mind—from machines I’ve seen, or books and articles I’ve read, or ideas I had thought of. But I don’t see how—”
He shook his head, in stubborn doubt.
“But there simply wasn’t time!” he insisted. “The whole place just came here—instantly!”
“I’m afraid you just don’t ’member.” Dawn sighed, baffled. “ ’Cause it seemed a long time to me, waiting out there in the cold, watching the rock while you changed it.”
Claypool looked out again, at that windless world that lay beyond the dome, black and cruel and dead. Something touched his spine with the chill of the thin silver light that fell from the far, tilted Galaxy.
He knew the science of transmutation. Inspecting operating atomic piles for the Defense Authority, he had witnessed awesome demonstrations, in which a tiny sample of sodium or aluminum or platinum was cautiously thrust through an opening in the shielding, and came out again as a mixture of deadly radioactives that had to be handled with long tongs and watched with mirrors, but containing traces of new-made magnesium or silicon or gold.
