Collected Short Fiction, page 518
He had seen that. And he knew the mechanics of nuclear transformation, by which the hot inferno of energies and particles in the pile rebuilt the atomic bricks of proton and neutron and electron into different elements. That was old stuff. But this—this was something different.
Cold granite dissolving suddenly to some inexplicable reagent of the mind, and flowing into sheets of welded steel thickly backed with insulating fiber glass, into scaled drums of compressed oxygen and bright-labeled cans of sweet corn, into that remarkable rhodomagnetic power and the slide rule on this desk—matter molded by sheer thought!
Because every electron, as a wave, exists everywhere. The chemical and physical properties of matter, he knew, are only patterns of electron identity. A change of pattern, he saw, would mean a change of substance—and the patterns are functions of exchange-force probability.
Probability! Itself an unsolved riddle, that must be the answer. Dawn had proved, many times, that mind-energy could somehow govern probability. Even little Lucky Ford had demonstrated that fact, long ago, with a pair of dice.
Here was—must be—the truth!
For art instant Claypool felt reassured by that flicker of understanding. But the brief illumination of it faded, and left him in the dark. White’s old questions came again to haunt him. What was the stuff of the mind, and by what mysterious grasp did it hold probability? What were the laws, and where the limits?
He shuddered a little, and absently picked up the new slide rule. He nodded in approval. The sections slid easily, and there were four special scales he remembered wanting for rhodomagnetic problems. He put it down, and turned back to the troubled child.
“I must have made it,” he said. “But I can’t remember.”
“You must try,” she insisted desperately. “Please—try awful hard. ’Cause the black things still have Mr. White and the rest. We must try awful hard to help them.”
Claypool nodded, and his lean jaw set.
“We’ll try.” And he stood a long time, gazing out across that dead landscape, at the high, leaning arch of diamond frost and silver dust which was the Galaxy. His face furrowed with weary effort, but the escape from Wing IV and the building of the shelter remained a blot of darkness.
Dawn watched his frown, and chewed her tiny fingers.
“Maybe if you think just how you learned it, maybe?” she whispered helpfully. “Maybe if you can ’member what you were doing, just before you can’t ’member?”
He started, as it came to him.
“Of course—the basic equation!”
Queer, how he hadn’t thought of that at all. Lying there on his hard narrow cot in the cage, with the dark machine on guard, he had been elated with the infinite promise of that equation. But, somehow, he hadn’t thought of it since. That enigmatic blind spot had somehow blotted it out of his mind.
Breathless, he found a pad at the little desk and hastily set the symbols of it down—shivering a little at the wonder of it, and taut with an odd alarm that somehow it might slip away again, beyond that mysterious wall of oblivion. Hopefully watching his pencil, Dawn whispered:
“Do you ’member now?”
He shook his head, and bitter tears came in her eyes.
“But now I think I begin to understand,” he said. “I think this equation is the key, if I just knew how to use it. Because it describes the interaction of electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic and paraphysical forces.”
He started to explain the symbols, but she shook her head.
“I can’t read,” she said. “ ’cause I never went to school, really, ‘cept to Mr. White. Some things I can do, like teleportation and hording back the cold.” She nodded, unafraid, at the black savagery of the silent world without. “But I never understand when Mr. White tries to ’splain how I do it. I’m sorry I can’t help you, ’cause we’ve just got to save them.”
Claypool scowled at the paper in his hand. Here, he knew, was the ultimate key to all the universe. Here was a secret of infinite power, which, he had somehow learned, and used triumphantly, and inexplicably forgotten. He sat down at the little desk, and set out to get it back.
“Better go and play,” he hugged the child. “Or rest.”
But she stayed with him in that dim-lit dome.
“Poor Mr. White is in such bad trouble,” she insisted anxiously. “And Mr. Lucky and the others—the black things make them go like machines, and we must help them get away. You must try awful hard!”
And Claypool tried.
Standing silently against the railing above the narrow stairwell. Dawn watched him frown at the doodles on his papers, and sit scowling out into the still, windless dark, and scrawl more doodles, and then sit scowling again.
“These are the expansions and transformations of the prime equation,” he told her once. “I’m trying to derive complete mathematical descriptions for all the paraphysical phenomena. Then maybe I can get it back—that art I must have used and forgotten.”
She stood silent, confused by the long words and yet desperately hopeful. She saw him writing fast again, and then he looked out of the dome, at the bed of frozen gravel where she had picked up nuggets.
“Huh?” He made an odd little grunt, and suddenly his tired face smiled. “Now!”
Then she heard a tiny click, and saw the worn bit of white metal fall to the desk top before him. She recognized the rich white color of palladium. The nugget lay there a moment, far too cold to touch unless you knew how. It gathered a white mist around it and it made a tiny hiss and crackle, and it grew swift white feathers of frost.
And then it was gone.
The tired little man at the desk looked up through the paneled dome, at the cruel, empty sky. He picked up the slide rule and worked it quickly. Then his thin, hurried lingers made more doodles on the yellow pad.
Dawn had always felt a little sorry for him, because he wasn’t big like Mr. White, and he had no fine red beard. He always seemed lonely and worried, and his thin shoulders had a troubled sag. She knew his leg was bad, and his face often looked as if his stomach hurt him.
But something changed him, now.
He stood up at the little desk, so quickly that the chair fell over behind him. He forgot his knee. His shoulders stiffened, and he seemed taller, and his soft brown eves had a different look—a hard fighting brightness, like she used to see in the grim blue eyes of Mr. White.
“Cover your face!” His warning voice was different, too—low and quick and confident. “Don’t look up!”
He glanced into the dark sky again, and made another pleased little grunt, and then put both hands over his own eyes. Dawn waited breathlessly, but nothing happened. A terrible fear struck her, that he must have failed again. She was looking at him anxiously, when it came.
It was brighter than lightning. It lit the cliffs, and the dry valley, and the flat hills beyond, with a sudden, savage light that turned them all from black to blinding white. Far off in the empty sky, she saw a new star. It burned brighter than the sun, and went out.
“Dawn!” He was breathless with concern. “Did I hurt you?”
She blinked her dazzled eyes.
“I stopped most of the light,” she said. “Please—do you ’member now?”
The little man at the desk stood proud and straight. She thought he looked a little funny, with his bald brown head and his close gray pajamas, but the furrows of worry were almost gone from his face. He smiled at her—a hard, eager little fighting smile, that reminded her of Mr. White.
“That was just one trails formation of the basic equation.” he pointed at his last scrap of paper on the desk, with those funny doodles on it. “It governs the detonation of mass into pure energy, by cancellation of the paraphysical component. I tried it on that nugget.” He nodded, where that star had been.
“I put the nugget out at space, thousands of miles away, and then I set it off. The light took a little time to reach us, but you saw how bright it was. An eight-ounce supernova !”
He showed her the scrap of paper, triumphantly.
“This is our weapon, Dawn! It’s as terrible as Project Thunderbolt—and I don’t think Mr. Ironsmith can steal this one!”
She caught an eager breath. “Then we can help poor Mr. White?”
“I think we can.” Claypool nodded his brown head, proudly now. “But there’s another thing, that I think we must do first.”
She waited, silent in her disappointment.
“We must find that nest of human traitors, first. Ironsmith and his peculiar friends, whoever they are.”
“Do you think you can beat them?”
“We must.” His wistful face turned thin and grim. “Because they’re bound to help the machines, under their Compact. They’ve always protected Wing IV, and they helped build that new grid, that has got Mr. White. So I don’t think we’ve any chance at all, unless we smash those traitors first.”
Uneasily, she peered toward the leaning, dusty splendor of the Galaxy.
“I’m so afraid—of Mr. Ironsmith,” she whispered. “ ’Cause I don’t really know him. I liked him at first—when he came with you to Dragonrock. Then he was nice and kind. He talked to me, and he gave me gum to chew. But he’s different, now.”
She moved nearer Claypool, in the shadowy cupola.
“He seems so terrible now. I ’member when he came to catch us on Wing IV, and he gave us to the machines. He seemed stronger than Mr. White, and I think he knows paraphysics. He doesn’t seem a bit like he used to be.”
But the little man in the loose gray pajamas stood straight and resolute.
“We’ve a weapon,” Claypool said. “We can fight him now.”
XXVII.
Dawn Hall watched the search for the traitors’ nest. She watched Claypool sitting in the white pool of light under the shaded lamp, making his strange hasty marks on scraps of paper, and sometimes working his slide rule feverishly and sometimes merely frowning at the leaning silver plume of the faraway Galaxy. She could see his discouragement.
Once he laid his pencil down, and wearily pushed his papers back.
“I can’t get it now,” he said. “I suppose I need Ironsmith’s computing section.” She saw the wry, brief smile that crossed his drawn brown face. “Because he always worked out the beautiful absractions, and I only applied them to reality.”
The dim-lit dome was very still, on that windless world where nothing ever moved and night would never end, and she could feel the cruel cold waiting silently, beyond the thin curve of the panels.
“I’m afraid of Mr. Ironsmith,” She stood where warm air came through a register, and tried not to shiver. “ ’Cause he knows paraphysics and he works with the black things and he doesn’t seem quite human any more.”
Claypool stared at his papers, with brown brooding eyes.
“I could never understand him.” Hate whispered harshly in his voice. “Or all the things he has done. But we know he’s against us, and that’s enough. We must smash him—if we can—however we can.”
His thin dark face grinned bleakly.
“I think that little trick of paraphysical matter detonation will surprise him. And I think it will help us force those machines into a new Compact, not quite so unfair, after he and his fellow renegades are gone.
“But we must find their hide-out, first.”
“Please,” Dawn said. “I’m getting awful hungry.”
They went down inside the shelter to the kitchen. Claypool found a loaf of bread and opened a can of meat and made hasty, soggy sandwiches. He washed one of them down himself, and swallowed a dyspepsia pill, and hurried back to the cupola.
He had left Dawn to eat alone, but she followed him anxiously back. She watched him at work until she fell asleep, sitting near him on the floor. She woke again, where he had put her to bed, down in her room in the shelter. Lonely and hungry and troubled and afraid, she came back to watch again.
He looked very tired. His eyes were reddened and hollowed, with dark rings around them. His brown face was thinner, with black stubble growing out on his cheeks. He limped very badly, when he stood up to walk about the little dome. She knew his hope was failing.
She was afraid to talk to him, but she saw his lowering scowls and heard his gloomy muttering. She watched him sweep all his clutter of papers off the little desk, in a sudden fit of impatience. He sat for a long time, just looking out across that black shallow valley. Suddenly, then, he snatched his pencil to set down another careful set of little twisted lines.
“Do you ’member now?” she whispered hopefully.
He shook his head, and she tried not to sob.
“Just one more transformation of the basic equation.” He spoke absently, looking toward the leaning pillar of silver fog, that was the Galaxy. “It defines space and time—as effects created by interaction of all the electromagnetic, rhodomagnetic, and paraphysical components of wave particles. The equation of clairvoyance, you might call it. Because it explains Overstreet’s kind of vision.”
She forgave all his scowling at nothingness.
“Then you can see Mr. Ironsmith?”
“I hope so, when I learn how to use it. Because the space factor vanishes, in the transformation, and the factor of past time is nearly negligible. The only actual limit left is a factor of uncertainty, which increases to infinity in future time.” She looked at him, silently reproachful.
“The equation should teach us how to see anything that is happening anywhere, right now,” he said, “except that strong paraphysical fields can protect limited areas from search. And we should be able to see things that happened long ago, though that will be a little harder. But things that haven’t happened yet will be dim and uncertain, because of that probability factor, and I don’t think we can see far ahead.”
“Then please hurry,” she urged him. “Please find Mr. Ironsmith, so we can help Mr. White.”
And he sat behind the little table under the dome, staring wistfully with mild brown eyes at the pale star-mist above the cruel valley. Dawn felt sorry for him again, because he looked so small and frail and worried. He wasn’t strong like Mr. White. She saw him rubbing at his bad knee, and she knew his stomach hurt him. But he kept on trying, and at last his brown straining eyes seemed to fix on something in the empty dark.
“Can you see?” she whispered.
“It’s hard to do.” His voice was slow with effort. “I’m clumsy, yet. The equation shows the method, but I haven’t learned the skill. It’s hard to focus the perception, hard not to see too much.”
For a long time he didn’t speak. Dawn watched him, and watched the toppling column of cloud beyond the low black cliffs, and wished he had time to make another sandwich. At last she saw his pale smile of triumph.
“I’ve found Ironsmith, now.” His voice was very low, and she leaned across the desk to hear. “Back at Starmont, when the machines first came. I see him again, and now—”
Claypool shuddered, where he sat. His brown face turned strangely gray, under the stubble of beard. His thin lips quivered and set. His bald head sank a little forward, and Dawn thought he looked as if a knife had stabbed him.
“What hurt you?” she whispered.
His stricken eyes came back for a moment, out of the far nothingness. He looked across the table at her, and gave her a thin, white smile, and straightened in his chair. And his hurt brown eyes looked back toward that slanted pillar of misty light, searching again.
“I saw him with Ruth.” His voice was faint and dry, faraway. “That doesn’t matter now—except to him and Ruth and me. And it’s hard to trace the identity patterns, where he is teleported. But we’ll have to follow him from Starmont.” He sat frowning into nothingness, the way Mr. Overstreet used to do. She watched the changes on his haggard face. A tiny smile made crinkles around his far-gazing eyes, and then they were dark again with dread.
“Please!” she whispered. “What do you see?”
“I’ve found it.” His voice was low and dry and strange. “The den of Ironsmith’s renegades.” He shook his head a little, peering at that leaning star cloud. “But I don’t quite get it! That Compact must be a bigger thing than I ever dreamed. Bigger and older and more evil.”
She shivered a little, and watched him. After a long time, his gaze came back from the dark. He drew a long tired breath, and smiled a little greeting to her, and then stood up to stretch. She saw him flinch, when he put too much weight on his bad knee. He still looked troubled and afraid.
“Did you find Mr. Ironsmith?” He began limping restlessly about the narrow cupola.
“I followed him, and I found the nest of traitors.” She saw his bitter disappointment. “But Ironsmith wasn’t there.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.” He made a baffled nod, toward that dim, diamond-dusted plume sloping over the black valley. “Still on Wing IV, I imagine. I was afraid to look for him there, because the field potential of that new grid is already pretty strong.”
She could see the dark fear that haunted him. But his narrow shoulders stiffened, in the thin gray pajamas, and he looked at her with a hard, bleak purpose.
“But Ironsmith is coming back to the place I found,” he said. “In spite of that probability factor, I found the place to wait for him, and I’ll be there.”
Dawn felt sorry for him again, because she knew he wasn’t used to fighting, and she could see how much his knee and his stomach hurt him. But his brown wistful face was sternly set, and she knew he meant to try.
“Where is this place?”
“On another planet, three light-years from Wing IV.” He spoke quickly, limping painfully and aimlessly about the little dome. “The renegades seem to be the only people there, and I think the humanoids have paid them pretty high for selling out the rest of us.”
His stubbled face was taut and dark and savage.
“Once, I think, the planet must have been depopulated with atomic war—looking back a hundred years in time, I could see only burned ruins, the bomb craters, and sterile wastelands still deadly with atomic residues.
