Collected Short Fiction, page 565
XXIV
BLANKLY, Forester turned away from the murmuring dark and the monstrous shape of defeat. Limping obediently toward the narrow bathroom behind his cage, he nodded at the way those smiling automatons had gone, inquiring listlessly, “How did you capture them?”
“Through Jane Carter,” the machine said. “They had hidden from us in a cave which had no physical entrance, but we reached them with the child’s mind, and took hold of them with paramechanical impulses from the energized test sections of the new grid. We controlled their own paramechanical capacities to bring them here.”
Stumbling on his painful knee, Forester had to let the quick mechanical support him. “Come along and let us tend you.” He heard its droning only vaguely. “Your test section of the grid will soon be energized, so that we can try it to repair the damaged ligaments.”
He limped passively along with the machine, and he let it put him to bed. Lying in the narrow cot, he tried to forget the glowing bars and the finality of his failure. He closed his eyes against an unendurable solicitude, and he tried to solve a riddle.
Stable atoms still existed, to prove the presence of some third component, acting to preserve all substance from spontaneous fission and dissolution into free energy under the furious disruptive force of the two components he knew. But rho had failed him. The unknown force refused to obey the established laws of either science, and its actual nature still escaped him. Unless, just possibly—
Forester caught his breath, recalling that the periodic table offered still a third triad—composed of the three precious heavy metals, platinum and osmium and iridium. The same elements the humanoids were using to build their dreadful new relays! Could that last triple group prove to be another convenient key, ready to unlock yet a third sort of energy?
The youthful thought spread a swift excitement through him now, but he tried to keep his body quiet. Afraid to look at his keeper, or even to let the rhythm of his breathing change, he tried to analyze and demonstrate that breathtaking new conception in the uninvaded laboratory of his mind.
The heavy elements of the platinum triad were indeed the logical key to that unknown component, it came to him, because the more powerfully disruptive electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic forces of the more massive atoms must obviously require a far greater intensity of that stabilizing energy to balance and contain them—it was only the ultimate failure of the binding component in the very heaviest atoms that allowed the fission of such elements as uranium.
Lying very still, wishing absently that he had Frank Ironsmith’s computing section to help him with the math, he groped with his mind alone for the nature and the laws of that unknown energy. Since electromagnetic effects varied with the second power of the distance, and rhodomagnetic with the first, he thought this third sort of energy should logically be invariant with distance. Again, since the velocity even of electromagnetic light was finite in time, and the speed of rhodomagnetic energy infinite, then the effects of the platinomagnetic force might reasonably somehow transcend time. And, if those two fumbling hypotheses were true—
HIS breathing paused again, and he couldn’t keep his body from stiffening on the cot. For Ash Overstreet could look into the future and the past, and the curious abilities of Lucky Ford and little Jane Carter were unlimited by distance. Trembling to a startled understanding of the platinum relays in that new grid, he recognized the unknown component. It was—it simply had to be—psychophysical energy!
“What disturbs you, sir?” inquired his keeper. “Are you still unhappy?”
“No trouble.” He mumbled the words, turning carefully on the cot to keep his face away from it. He breathed again and made his limbs relax, trying to seem merely restless in his sleep. “And I’m going to be very happy now.”
He was. Because that flash of intuition had been a wide illumination, lighting many things. It had closed the gaps in Mark White’s half-science, and swept away the baffling contradictions. It actually explained Jane Carter’s gift and Lucky Ford’s ability and Overstreet’s searching perception—with an answer more complete than the shadowy conjectures and the mocking uncertains hiding behind vague unknowns, out of which he had tried to shape his exchange-force hypothesis of mind and probability.
Lying still, relaxed again, he forgot the alert machine behind him. He forgot the bars, and his painful knee, and the long failure of his life. Absently regretful that Ironsmith couldn’t check his speculations, he began an awed exploration of the universe, by that tremendous, sudden light.
It wasn’t hope that urged him on—not consciously—for he thought hope was dead. He had yielded his body to the machines, and ceased all resistance. Waiting, resigned to whatever fate, he had simply released his intelligence upon the familiar paths of science, and now his triumphant mind began to rove through atoms and far galaxies.
For he had reached the oldest goal of alchemy and science. The fabulous prima materia, when now at last he grasped it, proved to be a very simple equation, so plainly obvious that he thought he should have found it long before. It merely stated the relation and equivalence of electromagnetic and rhodomagnetic and psychophysical energies, as involved most simply in the equilibrium of a stable atomic particle—revealing all three as different aspects of the single basic unity science had ever sought.
The sheer mathematical beauty of that equation brought Forester a deep glow of pleasure. For the integration was complete. The terms described the fundamental stuff of nature, neither electromagnetic nor rhodomagnetic nor psychophysical, but all three at once—the keystone of all the ordered splendor of the universe. Now at last, too late to help anything, he saw the picture whole.
The transformations and derivations of that equation of equivalence, Forester perceived, would explain the origin of atoms and the universe, the gravitation of matter and the dispersion of the galaxies, the dark paradox of time and the nature of space, and doubtless even the birth and meaning of life and mind themselves.
Lying quiet on that hard cot, he was lost in the elemental grandeur of that concept. He had forgotten the gray-walled cage around him, and his sleepless keeper watching, and the unpleasant fact that he himself was waiting for the scalpels of another research project—until the humanoid touched his arm.
“Service, Clay Forester,” it said. “We’re ready now.”
Then he was no longer in the cage.
HE WAS standing on a flat gravel bed, at the bottom of a shallow, dry watercourse On his left were low dark cliffs, formed where the vanished stream had cut against an outcropping granite ridge. The barren gravel fields spread far to his right, and beyond were hills, lying low and naked and dead beside the wide shallow valley of the ancient river.
It was night, and cruelly cold.
For this was not Wing IV. The sky told him that. The gray murk of the humanoid planet was gone, and the sky above the low dark cliffs and the far black hills was a dead and utter black, scattered with only a few tiny oval blobs of gray mist. Towering against the dark, above the foot of that dead valley, was a tall, leaning dome of pale white splendor, a remote incredible spray of diamond glints frozen motionless.
For a moment he merely stared, shivering and bewildered, shrinking from the savage attack of the cold. For he stood barefoot on the icy sharpness of the gravel, clad only in the thin gray pajamas in which his mechanical keeper had clad him. The cruel cold sucked out his breath and seared his skin, and he stood blank with his stunned perplexity until he felt the tug of a child’s anxious hand.
“Oh, Dr. Forester!” Jane Carter was crouched beside him on the river-worn gravel, no longer a creature of the machines. Her huge frightened eyes could see again, and that serene cold smile of far forgetfulness was gone. “I’m so cold!” She shivered against him. “Please take me out of the cold.”
“But how can I do that”—he shuddered beneath a crushing wonderment—“when I don’t even know where we are?”
He found that he couldn’t really speak, because that 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 place was utterly dead. Yet the child seemed to understand him, for a new dismay was sick in her eyes.
“Don’t you know?” She frowned up at him, her thin face stiff with pain, and he realized that he hadn’t heard her actual voice at all. “You ought to know,” she said. “ ’Cause you took me away from the black machines, and you brought us both out here. All I did was show you where to come.”
“No—that couldn’t be!” He shook his head dazedly. “I don’t remember doing anything at all. I didn’t even hope to get away, and I certainly don’t know where we are.”
“I know that.” She clung close to him, her unvoiced thought more rapid than speech. “This is the cold, far place Mr. White used to send me to pick up palladium nuggets. I used to hurry right back to the cave, to keep from freezing—but now we can’t go there.” Her anxious fingers were icy in his own. “Please—where can we go?”
But Forester was mute, swaying to a numbed understanding. He remembered those frosty nuggets of alluvial palladium Jane had brought back from the gravels of a sunless planet that was cold to the absolute zero, and now he saw the terrible meaning of the starless dark and that tall galaxy of diamond dust beyond the black and barren hills. The merciless, still cold sank into him more piercingly. For now he knew that he and Jane had been somehow marooned on this lifeless planet lost outside their native universe of stars.
“It’s so awful cold,” the frightened child was sobbing. “Please, can’t you do—anything? I can’t keep us alive much longer here without breathing. And I don’t know anywhere safe to go. Please, can’t you—”
Blankly, Forester shook his head. Because it must have taken a long billion years, he thought, for this stray atom of a world to drift so far through the extragalactic dark. It must have been time beyond imagining since some lost sun had warmed these old black hills, since vanished waters had washed this frozen gravel. Peering at the black frown of those worn cliffs, he dropped his thin shoulders hopelessly. Nothing at all could live at the absolute zero.
“No, Jane, I don’t think I brought us here.” He was trying gently not to increase her fright, until he saw in her uplifted eyes that she knew all his own overpowering dismay. “Maybe the humanoids did it, with that new grid.”
“ ’Scuse me, but you did it. You fought that new brain machine to take me from it, and you teleported us both out here.” Her dark eyes held a solemn plea. “Mr. White would say you’re awful good—but I’m still afraid we’re going to die. Can’t you find a warm place for us, with air?”
“I can’t do teleportation,” he insisted bleakly. “Or anything else. But you can go—somewhere.” He pushed her slight body from him. “Better leave me, and look for some safe place.”
“No—please—there isn’t any!” She clung to him desperately. “You did take me away from the machines, even if you don’t remember. You’re still fighting that brain thing to keep me, even if you don’t seem to know it. So we must stay together—don’t you see?”
“We’ll keep together.” Die together, he thought, nodding to an uneasy acquiescence. “Can you tell me how you hold back the cold, so I can help?”
She only shook her head, shivering against him, already exhausted. She didn’t know, not consciously, and her unconscious psychophysical adaptation could keep them both alive no more than a few minutes longer.
He forgot his own despair, and bent to pick her up. His bad leg buckled. He fell, searing his hands on the gravel, and lurched feebly back to his knees. He lifted her tenderly, trying to shield her with his arms, for he knew nothing else to do. He could feel her straining effort to hold back that implacable emptiness of cold, but he knew no way to share the burden. She seemed to flinch and quiver, and instantly the cold slashed at them with new fury, as if her life and her power had almost failed. Swept with an infinite helpless compassion, he wished he knew how to help her.
“The door!” She stirred weakly in his stiff arms, trying to point. “See it—there!”
Turning painfully where he knelt, he found a faint new gleam above the rim of those changeless, ancient cliffs. Dimly, his fading vision made out the smooth curve of a transparent cupola there, washed with the pale cold radiance of the far galaxy. Against the dark rock below, he saw a green light burning.
He shook his head stiffly, and peered again. Because it couldn’t be a light. Nothing could be still alive to light any sort of beacon on this dark world, and he was certain that cupola hadn’t been there, anyhow, when he first saw the cliffs.
“Please!” Jane was sobbing. “Hurry—”
He didn’t wait to wonder any longer. Swaying laboriously to his feet, he picked her up again. A frozen numbness tried to hold him, and a painful roaring was increasing in his ears, but he staggered with her toward that green-lit opening.
He lurched across a shining metal threshold. Inside the tiny chamber where the green light burned, he saw that it must be an air lock. His bleared and throbbing eyes found a row of buttons, one glowing dimly green. He punched it clumsily, with a finger that had no strength or feeling left, and a massive valve slid up to shut them in.
Air screamed in, a warm and kindly hurricane. He filled his burning lungs, and breathed. His sight began to clear, and that pressure of roaring blood decreased in his ears, and his stiffened feet began to ache again to the good warmth of the floor.
Jane Carter was still in his arms, limp and silent. Catching her thin blue wrist, he felt no pulse. Her flesh seemed very cold, even to his numbed hands, and he thought she must be dead. He was bending to lay her down when he felt a sudden warmth—as if some psychokinetic force, he thought, had acted directly upon her to accelerate the molecular motion of heat. She shuddered convulsively, drawing a long sighing breath. Her dark eyes opened, seeing again, full of a complete devotion.
“Oh, thank you, Dr. Forester!” Now he could hear the grave sweetness of her voice, her own again. Seeming fully restored, she slipped quickly out of his arms. Her smile was human now, relaxed and glad. “I think Mr. White would say you’re very, very good!”
Puzzled again by her sudden recovery, Forester looked around him with a mounting bewilderment.
The clean warm air had a faint smell of new paint. The buttons which worked the valves were made of the newest sort of translucent synthetic—and all neatly labeled in his own language. Riveted to the case of the control mechanism was the familiar name plate of the Acme Engineering Corporation—a small firm which had contracted to supply certain machinings for the neutrino search tubes of his own Project Lookout.
Calling up the courage to experiment, he gingerly pushed the button marked “Inner Valve—To Open.” Something hummed inside the case. An amber light flashed, and a warning gong rang. And another heavy wedge of polished steel slid down, to let them into the shelter. Quivering with a voiceless astonishment, he led the child inside.
Exploring this enigmatic sanctuary, they followed a wide passage back into the rock. Plates of smoothly welded metal lined it, painted with the same shades of cream and gray that Forester had chosen for his own office back at Starmont. The soft illumination came from recessed fluorescent fixtures—which bore the familiar trade-mark of United Electric.
Doors were spaced along the tunnel, fitted with knobs for a man to turn. Forester pushed them open as he passed, to look dazedly into the rooms beyond. The first housed a power plant, with a small rotary converter humming silently beside a bank of transformers, and a stand-by unit waiting.
The next room was a kitchen—oddly like Ruth’s had been, in the little house the humanoids had wrecked when they took over Starmont. The electric range and the streamlined refrigerator were the same white and shining United Electric models, and the canned and packaged food stacked in the shelves was all gaudy with the same familiar labels of standard brands.
He found a room for himself, and a smaller one for Jane. The table beside his bed was thoughtfully stacked with a dozen of his favorite books—but there was none, he sat with a faint disappointment, that he hadn’t read. The bathroom was even supplied with the soap and toothpaste he liked, and the razor on the shelf was incredibly like his own.
At the farther end of the tunnel, a narrow stair led upward. They climbed it breathlessly, and came up into the crystal-domed cupola that he had seen from outside. Chilled with an increasing awed perplexity, he stood staring at the dead landscape beyond the curving panels.
Nothing had changed, outside. The cruel sky was black and strange. The biting cold and the brooding loneliness of this deadly night took hold of him again, and he shuddered convulsively. Jane Carter caught his hand, to whisper anxiously:
“Is it something very bad?”
“Nothing bad.” He smiled down at her apprehensive face with the best assurance he could manufacture. “I just don’t understand. I don’t know how we got here—so far from home that all the stars men ever knew are lost in that cloud, yonder. I’m sure I did nothing—”
“But you did,” she broke in softly. “ ’Scuse me, but you really did.”
“Maybe it was Mark White.” Looking up again at that remote plume of mist that was a billion stars, he ignored her shy protest. “Maybe he somehow beat the machines, after all!” That exciting possibility lifted his voice. “Maybe he had this place ready—and somehow broke free from that grid, long enough to teleport us here.”
She shook her head. “But it wasn’t Mr. White.”
“How do you know?” He shivered again, to the monstrous cold that crouched outside the dome. “Somebody from our world must have built it—quite lately.” Blinking at her breathless astonishment, he dropped his shoulders helplessly. “I just don’t get it! Everything’s so—familiar. The books I like. My kind of toothpaste. Even a bottle of the capsules I take for indigestion, with Dr. Pitcher’s name on it, and the right prescription number!”
