Short fiction complete, p.8
Short Fiction Complete, page 8
“If she had wanted to . . .”
“Do you still love her?” Elaine asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I know what love really is, anymore. All I know is . . . on that long trip out to Vega, when I had nothing to do but sit and think, it wasn’t Ruth I was thinking about. It was you.”
“Oh . . .”
They talked a bit more, and finally he took her in his arms and kissed her and she was his, at least for a little while.
WEEKS lapsed into months, and the work on Titan inched steadily along. If he stopped to think about it, Lee knew that all they were doing was scratching around the base of the problem, and making precious little headway. The blind men and the elephant, he told himself. But then he asked himself what else they could possibly do, and the answer was always, nothing. But the machine was still there, doing whatever it was designed to do, and he could sense the scornful laughter of its creators as he vainly tried to understand their work. Only the thought of Elaine, the sight of her, the touch of her, allowed him to keep his sense of balance.
People left Titan, baffled and confused; new people arrived—eager, full of energy, excited at the chance to tackle the unknown, undimmed—at first—by the day-to-day frustrations of trying to unlock a door that has no key.
* * *
Lee dialed his selection at the robocafeteria and waited a few moments for the tray of food to appear at the pickup table. He had spent the morning shut away in his office, searching months worth of reports for some glimmer of encouragement. There was progress, of course; there was always progress. But it was never in a direction that would take them closer to the final answer.
And, carefully tucked into the top drawer of his desk was a nasty yellow sheet that bore a querulous message from Earth: What is the status of the project? Why are expenditures constantly climbing? Is a ninety-three-man staff really needed? When can some solid results be expected?
Lee picked an unoccupied table and sat down. As he started to eat, a quartet of young engineers, headed by Dr. Kurtzman, came in and sat at the next table.
“I still don’t see why they keep digging,” one of them was saying. “They’ll never find anything outside the buildings.”
Another countered, “Look, they’ve got to follow every possible angle. The only way we’re ever going to understand this thing is to put together every scrap of evidence we can find until there’s enough to form an understandable picture.”
Kurtzman shook his head. “Not at all. This isn’t going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. There’s more evidence in those buildings than we can ever hope to digest. It’s not a matter of adding up clues . . . this is going to be a gestalt. One of these days, somebody’s going to get a few thousand million of his brain cells turned the right way, and he’ll say, “Ah-HAH!” Then we’ll have it. Until then, it’s our job to keep poking around, hoping to find the right piece of information to trigger the gestalt.”
The first one spluttered. “But that . . . that’s non-scientific!”
“So?” Kurtzman asked, arching his eyebrows. “Do you see science making any great strides around here? We’re in over our heads. Intuition is the only thing that can save us.”
“If we’re that bad off, we might as well quit,” the first one said. “In fact, that might be the best idea of all. Forget it and go home. Let the damned machine run for another million years, if it wants to.”
Lee could not keep quiet any longer. “That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” he said, turning on the surprised engineer. “Give it up and forget about it, without knowing where it came from, or what it’s doing, or why.”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“Listen to me. It’s not just that the thing could be a weapon. It may not be. But we don’t know. And as long as we don’t know, we’ve got to keep trying to find out. Understand?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“And there’s more at stake here than just an intellectual puzzle,” Lee insisted. “If we turn our backs on this machine, we’ve turned our backs on a basic premise of all scientific thought. If we admit that we can’t understand this machine, then we admit that there’s an absolute limit to our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witch-doctor’s claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with. Taboo!
“The basic nature of man and science is at stake here! We’ve got to understand that machine. Our claim to the stars is tied up in it.”
Lee looked up and saw that everyone in the dining hall was watching him. He stood up.
“Sorry; I didn’t mean to get so vehement,” he mumbled to the engineer. “Guess I’m a bit edgy today.”
He walked quickly out of the dining area and returned to his office.
SLOWLY, quietly, the work went on. Dr. Petchkovich spent six weeks on Mercury, supervising at first hand the investigation of the area where the machine’s antennas were focused. He returned to Titan in high excitement.
“We have definitely proved that there is a disturbance in the interplanetary magnetic field at the focal point of the machine’s antennas,” he announced to the department heads, when they convened in the conference room to hear his report.
“How strong a disturbance?” Dr. Kulaki asked.
Petchkovich hesitated a moment. “Well, it’s only one part in a hundred thousand . . .”
The excitement died quickly. It was a discovery, yes. But it did not bring them any closer to understanding the machine and its purpose.
* * *
Lee was sitting at his desk, staring moodily at a graph that Dr. Childe had left with him: the results of the Orbital Computing Center’s extrapolation of the wave patterns broadcast by the machine.
The phone buzzer sounded. Without taking his eyes from the graph, Lee flicked the phone on.
“Are you busy right now?”
He looked up and saw Elaine’s face on the screen. “No, not really,” he answered. “Come on in.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
As soon as she came through the door he knew that something was wrong. She was trying too hard not to look concerned.
“What’s up?” he asked her.
She shrugged and sat down in front of the desk. “I just thought we might talk for awhile.”
“In my office?”
“It concerns official business.”
“I see.”
She looked at the graph. “What’s that? Something new?”
Changing the subject, he thought to himself. What’s she afraid of?
Aloud, he answered, “It’s Childe’s results from the Big Brain . . . the machine’s wave patterns extrapolated over a million years.” He turned the graph around so she could see it better.
Elaine studied it for a moment, then shook her head. “Childe was right, wasn’t he? It doesn’t make any sense at all. No pattern, no rhyme, no reason.”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “There’s something . . . well, something strange about these waves. They don’t follow a regular pattern, and yet . . .”
“What?”
He frowned. “They’re just too damned irregular to be really random. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Well, anyway, I’ve got the feeling that I’ve seen this pattern—or lack of pattern—before. Somewhere I’ve seen something that looks a lot like this . . . but I can’t remember where.”
Elaine looked at the graph again, at the multiple curves swinging back and forth across the paper, intertwining in seeming confusion. “It looks like some of the graphs I drew when I was an undergrad.”
He laughed. “Maybe that’s where I saw it.”
There was an awkward silence. Lee got up from his seat and walked around the desk. He pulled up another chair and sat beside Elaine. “Now, what’s the trouble?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said slowly. “I . . . I’ve decided to transfer off Titan.”
“Leave? But why?”
“For us, Sid. For both of us. Before we get so wrapped up in each other that we won’t be able to break it up without really getting hurt . . .”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She spoke calmly and softly, no tears, no hysterics. She had thought it all out very carefully. “Sid, take a look around you. We’re like two castaways on a desert world. We love each other—here and now. But we won’t always be here. What happens when we leave Titan? What happens when we’re not faced with the loneliness and that . . . that thing out there? Suppose we find that we don’t really need each other? What then?”
“But I do need you, Elaine. I love you.”
“You do now,” she answered. “But how long will it last? Sid, I have to get away, at least for a little while. I need a sense of perspective.”
“I see,” he said, shifting his gaze away from her. “That doesn’t leave me much to say, does it? All right, Elaine. Make out a transfer request and I’ll sign it.”
“Thanks. I . . . I hope you understand.” She got up and started slowly toward the door.
“I’m not so sure that you understand this yourself,” he replied. “But I know this—I don’t want to lose you, Elaine. If you haven’t worked this out within a month or so after you leave Titan, I’ll come looking for you.”
She turned and, without a word, went over and kissed him. Then she quickly left the office.
Lee returned to his desk. He sat down and stared at Childe’s graph again. After a few minutes, he angrily slapped it in a drawer, slammed the. thing shut, and stamped out of the room.
PERSONAL matters were soon buried in the excitement of another discovery, this time an important one. It looked promising.
Kurtzman and Kulaki finally discovered what form of energy the antennas were beaming out.
After years of trial-and-error experimentation, the engineer and electronicist asked Richards and Childe to lend a hand. With a firm theoretical and mathematical background to bolster their work, Kurtzman and Kulaki started out on a process of elimination.
They soon proved that the antennas were not broadcasting any known form of electromagnetic energy, from gamma to long-radio waves. They investigated one possibility after another, turning up a steady succession of negative answers. Negative, but answers all the same, It was time-consuming, but at least they were definitely determining which avenues were blind alleys.
Then Childe started tinkering with a hunch, and showed his paperwork to Richards. The two. of them made a few suggestions to Kurtzman and Kulaki. Their problem was that their detection instruments were drawing blanks, when applied to the antennas’ output. But the power input to the antennas showed they were working continuously.
Childe showed, mathematically, that their output must be an extremely weak, low-frequency form of energy. Richards agreed, and pointed out that there was only one known form of energy that fulfilled these conditions: gravity.
“Gravity waves?” Kurtzman asked, incredulously, when they told him about it.
Kulaki’s mind reacted faster. “Knowing it’s gravity waves, on paper, and proving it experimentally are two different things.”
But they were up to the test. They had to scavenge equipment from the center’s grav screen machinery, and the whole underground community was without its Earth-normal grav field for two and a half days, but when the field was returned to normal (and people stopped hopping and bouncing all through the center) Kurtzman and Kulaki had proved that the antennas were indeed beaming out gravity waves.
It’s all here, Lee thought, as he read their combined report. Now we know what the machine is doing. But to what purpose? What influence does this have on Earth?
Then he put down the report and turned to another bit of paperwork that lay on his desk: Elaine’s official request for a transfer. He looked through it automatically. There was a place marked Justification for Request. Elaine had typed simply, “Personal.” Lee flipped to the last page and signed.
He leaned back in his chair and tried to let his mind float free; forget about her, forget about the buildings out there, forget about everything . . . at least for a few moments. Just drift and let your mind wander where it pleases . . .
THE automatic secretary on his desk hummed into life and announced, “Department heads’ meeting starts in five minutes.” To hell with the department heads. To hell with Titan. A world of cold and dark and ice. Like Dante’s Inferno. Titan is hell. A place where sinning scientists are sent. Their punishment is to stand out in the cold and try to solve the unanswerable. Forever. Stand in the icy darkness and try to understand the unknown. Once in a while you make a discovery that excites you; but when you look again, your discovery is meaningless, you know as little about the real answer as you knew before. The discoveries are just part of the punishment, part of the eternal torment, they just keep you going after the carrot on the stick, but the carrot is always out of reach . . .
“Department heads’ meeting beginning now,” the automatic voice said.
Lee cocked an eye at the tiny device. “All right,” he said, getting up, “I’m going.”
The meeting was strictly routine. The reaction had set in. A week ago they had all been agog with the gravity-waves discovery. Now it had become apparent that the discovery had not opened the door they were trying to get through. We’re like children, Lee thought, trying to put together a stereo transceiver from an assembly kit; all the pieces are there, but we can’t get them together in the proper way.
It was a short meeting. As they broke up, Lee saw Richards walk over to Elaine.
“I hear you’re leaving us,” the young physicist said. “Going Earthside?”
“Yes,” Elaine answered. “For a while, at least.”
Richards broke into his feline grin again. “Good. I’ll be vacationing on Earth in a few weeks. Do you like to ski?”
“I haven’t skied in years . . .”
“There’s a lodge I go to in Switzerland. Really fine. And the skiing is marvelous. Even if you don’t want to ski, there are mountains to climb . . . and glaciers . . .”
Lee started toward them, thought better of it, and walked sullenly out of the room. He went to his office, sat fidgeting at his desk for a while, then called her on the intercom. She was not at her office or her quarters, so the equipment automatically paged her. When her face finally showed on the viewscreen, Lee could see that she was still in the conference room, which was now empty, except for her and Richards.
“What is it, Sid?”
“Uh . . . can you come down to my office for a minute? Right now?”
She quickly covered her surprise. “Of course. I’ll be right down.”
WITHIN a few minutes, she was entering his office. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he said, gesturing her to a chair. “I just wanted to get you out of the grips of that All-American physicist.”
“What? Why, you jealous old goat!”
“Never mind. If you want to listen to propositions, please make sure I’m out of earshot.”
She laughed. “Is that what you brought me down here for?”
“Yes.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be cute.”
“He’s a very nice boy.”
He frowned. “All right, so I’m foolish and juvenile . . .”
“And he’s so interesting,” she went on, paying no attention. “He was telling me all about glaciers. In Switzerland. Near this ski lodge. Seems the glaciers have been growing during the past few years. Something I should really be sure to see.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Lee grumbled.
“Oh, it is. The glaciers, that is. They were retreating, you know, until a few years ago. Now they’re growing again. Goes in cycles, it seems . . .”
Lee suddenly stiffened. “Great God of our forefathers!”
“What now?”
Instead of answering, he scrambled out of his chair and went to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that lined one wall of the office.
“Sid, what’s the matter? Did I say something . . .”
But he was not listening to her. “That’s it,” he was muttering, “That must be it.”
Elaine watched him paw through the shelves of books, desperately searching for something.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“No. I think . . .” he snatched at a book and riffled through it. “Yes! Look at it!”
He wheeled and shoved the open book at her. She nearly dropped it as he ducked back around his desk and rummaged through a pile of papers.
“Here it is. Look at them!” he shouted, handing her a sheet of paper. “Put them side by side and look at them.”
The book was opened to a graph, Elaine saw, that showed the advance and retreat of the Ice Age glaciers over the past million years on Earth. The sheet of paper was Childe’s graph of the wave patterns of the machine’s antennas.
Her face went pale as she looked at the two graphs, side by side. “They . . . they’re the same . . . almost identical.”
“It all fits together now,” Lee said, drumming his fingers on the desktop in a restless tattoo. “The machine beams gravity waves into the interplanetary plasma between the Sun and Mercury. The effect is infinitesimal, by our short-term standards, but over a hundred thousand years or so, the cumulative effect must be enough to block off a small fraction of the Sun’s radiation. The Earth goes into a deep freeze for a few millenia!”
“But why?” Elaine asked. “Why did the Others build it?”
LEE paced nervously across the room. “Think a minute. They had beaten the Earthmen in a bitter interstellar war. They had done their best to wipe out the human race. What better way to insure their victory than by subjecting our homeworld to violent climate changes? They probably thought they were guaranteeing the complete extinction of mankind.”
“But the Ice Ages didn’t destroy man,” Elaine said.
“No. They reduced him to the level of a beast, though. Those few survivors of the interstellar war were robbed of their civilization. They had to go back to living in caves, to fighting the other animals for sheer survival. They made it, though, and re-learned what was lost, and built a new civilization.”
“Do you still love her?” Elaine asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think I know what love really is, anymore. All I know is . . . on that long trip out to Vega, when I had nothing to do but sit and think, it wasn’t Ruth I was thinking about. It was you.”
“Oh . . .”
They talked a bit more, and finally he took her in his arms and kissed her and she was his, at least for a little while.
WEEKS lapsed into months, and the work on Titan inched steadily along. If he stopped to think about it, Lee knew that all they were doing was scratching around the base of the problem, and making precious little headway. The blind men and the elephant, he told himself. But then he asked himself what else they could possibly do, and the answer was always, nothing. But the machine was still there, doing whatever it was designed to do, and he could sense the scornful laughter of its creators as he vainly tried to understand their work. Only the thought of Elaine, the sight of her, the touch of her, allowed him to keep his sense of balance.
People left Titan, baffled and confused; new people arrived—eager, full of energy, excited at the chance to tackle the unknown, undimmed—at first—by the day-to-day frustrations of trying to unlock a door that has no key.
* * *
Lee dialed his selection at the robocafeteria and waited a few moments for the tray of food to appear at the pickup table. He had spent the morning shut away in his office, searching months worth of reports for some glimmer of encouragement. There was progress, of course; there was always progress. But it was never in a direction that would take them closer to the final answer.
And, carefully tucked into the top drawer of his desk was a nasty yellow sheet that bore a querulous message from Earth: What is the status of the project? Why are expenditures constantly climbing? Is a ninety-three-man staff really needed? When can some solid results be expected?
Lee picked an unoccupied table and sat down. As he started to eat, a quartet of young engineers, headed by Dr. Kurtzman, came in and sat at the next table.
“I still don’t see why they keep digging,” one of them was saying. “They’ll never find anything outside the buildings.”
Another countered, “Look, they’ve got to follow every possible angle. The only way we’re ever going to understand this thing is to put together every scrap of evidence we can find until there’s enough to form an understandable picture.”
Kurtzman shook his head. “Not at all. This isn’t going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. There’s more evidence in those buildings than we can ever hope to digest. It’s not a matter of adding up clues . . . this is going to be a gestalt. One of these days, somebody’s going to get a few thousand million of his brain cells turned the right way, and he’ll say, “Ah-HAH!” Then we’ll have it. Until then, it’s our job to keep poking around, hoping to find the right piece of information to trigger the gestalt.”
The first one spluttered. “But that . . . that’s non-scientific!”
“So?” Kurtzman asked, arching his eyebrows. “Do you see science making any great strides around here? We’re in over our heads. Intuition is the only thing that can save us.”
“If we’re that bad off, we might as well quit,” the first one said. “In fact, that might be the best idea of all. Forget it and go home. Let the damned machine run for another million years, if it wants to.”
Lee could not keep quiet any longer. “That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” he said, turning on the surprised engineer. “Give it up and forget about it, without knowing where it came from, or what it’s doing, or why.”
“I didn’t mean . . .”
“Listen to me. It’s not just that the thing could be a weapon. It may not be. But we don’t know. And as long as we don’t know, we’ve got to keep trying to find out. Understand?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“And there’s more at stake here than just an intellectual puzzle,” Lee insisted. “If we turn our backs on this machine, we’ve turned our backs on a basic premise of all scientific thought. If we admit that we can’t understand this machine, then we admit that there’s an absolute limit to our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witch-doctor’s claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with. Taboo!
“The basic nature of man and science is at stake here! We’ve got to understand that machine. Our claim to the stars is tied up in it.”
Lee looked up and saw that everyone in the dining hall was watching him. He stood up.
“Sorry; I didn’t mean to get so vehement,” he mumbled to the engineer. “Guess I’m a bit edgy today.”
He walked quickly out of the dining area and returned to his office.
SLOWLY, quietly, the work went on. Dr. Petchkovich spent six weeks on Mercury, supervising at first hand the investigation of the area where the machine’s antennas were focused. He returned to Titan in high excitement.
“We have definitely proved that there is a disturbance in the interplanetary magnetic field at the focal point of the machine’s antennas,” he announced to the department heads, when they convened in the conference room to hear his report.
“How strong a disturbance?” Dr. Kulaki asked.
Petchkovich hesitated a moment. “Well, it’s only one part in a hundred thousand . . .”
The excitement died quickly. It was a discovery, yes. But it did not bring them any closer to understanding the machine and its purpose.
* * *
Lee was sitting at his desk, staring moodily at a graph that Dr. Childe had left with him: the results of the Orbital Computing Center’s extrapolation of the wave patterns broadcast by the machine.
The phone buzzer sounded. Without taking his eyes from the graph, Lee flicked the phone on.
“Are you busy right now?”
He looked up and saw Elaine’s face on the screen. “No, not really,” he answered. “Come on in.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
As soon as she came through the door he knew that something was wrong. She was trying too hard not to look concerned.
“What’s up?” he asked her.
She shrugged and sat down in front of the desk. “I just thought we might talk for awhile.”
“In my office?”
“It concerns official business.”
“I see.”
She looked at the graph. “What’s that? Something new?”
Changing the subject, he thought to himself. What’s she afraid of?
Aloud, he answered, “It’s Childe’s results from the Big Brain . . . the machine’s wave patterns extrapolated over a million years.” He turned the graph around so she could see it better.
Elaine studied it for a moment, then shook her head. “Childe was right, wasn’t he? It doesn’t make any sense at all. No pattern, no rhyme, no reason.”
“I don’t know,” Lee said. “There’s something . . . well, something strange about these waves. They don’t follow a regular pattern, and yet . . .”
“What?”
He frowned. “They’re just too damned irregular to be really random. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Well, anyway, I’ve got the feeling that I’ve seen this pattern—or lack of pattern—before. Somewhere I’ve seen something that looks a lot like this . . . but I can’t remember where.”
Elaine looked at the graph again, at the multiple curves swinging back and forth across the paper, intertwining in seeming confusion. “It looks like some of the graphs I drew when I was an undergrad.”
He laughed. “Maybe that’s where I saw it.”
There was an awkward silence. Lee got up from his seat and walked around the desk. He pulled up another chair and sat beside Elaine. “Now, what’s the trouble?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said slowly. “I . . . I’ve decided to transfer off Titan.”
“Leave? But why?”
“For us, Sid. For both of us. Before we get so wrapped up in each other that we won’t be able to break it up without really getting hurt . . .”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
She spoke calmly and softly, no tears, no hysterics. She had thought it all out very carefully. “Sid, take a look around you. We’re like two castaways on a desert world. We love each other—here and now. But we won’t always be here. What happens when we leave Titan? What happens when we’re not faced with the loneliness and that . . . that thing out there? Suppose we find that we don’t really need each other? What then?”
“But I do need you, Elaine. I love you.”
“You do now,” she answered. “But how long will it last? Sid, I have to get away, at least for a little while. I need a sense of perspective.”
“I see,” he said, shifting his gaze away from her. “That doesn’t leave me much to say, does it? All right, Elaine. Make out a transfer request and I’ll sign it.”
“Thanks. I . . . I hope you understand.” She got up and started slowly toward the door.
“I’m not so sure that you understand this yourself,” he replied. “But I know this—I don’t want to lose you, Elaine. If you haven’t worked this out within a month or so after you leave Titan, I’ll come looking for you.”
She turned and, without a word, went over and kissed him. Then she quickly left the office.
Lee returned to his desk. He sat down and stared at Childe’s graph again. After a few minutes, he angrily slapped it in a drawer, slammed the. thing shut, and stamped out of the room.
PERSONAL matters were soon buried in the excitement of another discovery, this time an important one. It looked promising.
Kurtzman and Kulaki finally discovered what form of energy the antennas were beaming out.
After years of trial-and-error experimentation, the engineer and electronicist asked Richards and Childe to lend a hand. With a firm theoretical and mathematical background to bolster their work, Kurtzman and Kulaki started out on a process of elimination.
They soon proved that the antennas were not broadcasting any known form of electromagnetic energy, from gamma to long-radio waves. They investigated one possibility after another, turning up a steady succession of negative answers. Negative, but answers all the same, It was time-consuming, but at least they were definitely determining which avenues were blind alleys.
Then Childe started tinkering with a hunch, and showed his paperwork to Richards. The two. of them made a few suggestions to Kurtzman and Kulaki. Their problem was that their detection instruments were drawing blanks, when applied to the antennas’ output. But the power input to the antennas showed they were working continuously.
Childe showed, mathematically, that their output must be an extremely weak, low-frequency form of energy. Richards agreed, and pointed out that there was only one known form of energy that fulfilled these conditions: gravity.
“Gravity waves?” Kurtzman asked, incredulously, when they told him about it.
Kulaki’s mind reacted faster. “Knowing it’s gravity waves, on paper, and proving it experimentally are two different things.”
But they were up to the test. They had to scavenge equipment from the center’s grav screen machinery, and the whole underground community was without its Earth-normal grav field for two and a half days, but when the field was returned to normal (and people stopped hopping and bouncing all through the center) Kurtzman and Kulaki had proved that the antennas were indeed beaming out gravity waves.
It’s all here, Lee thought, as he read their combined report. Now we know what the machine is doing. But to what purpose? What influence does this have on Earth?
Then he put down the report and turned to another bit of paperwork that lay on his desk: Elaine’s official request for a transfer. He looked through it automatically. There was a place marked Justification for Request. Elaine had typed simply, “Personal.” Lee flipped to the last page and signed.
He leaned back in his chair and tried to let his mind float free; forget about her, forget about the buildings out there, forget about everything . . . at least for a few moments. Just drift and let your mind wander where it pleases . . .
THE automatic secretary on his desk hummed into life and announced, “Department heads’ meeting starts in five minutes.” To hell with the department heads. To hell with Titan. A world of cold and dark and ice. Like Dante’s Inferno. Titan is hell. A place where sinning scientists are sent. Their punishment is to stand out in the cold and try to solve the unanswerable. Forever. Stand in the icy darkness and try to understand the unknown. Once in a while you make a discovery that excites you; but when you look again, your discovery is meaningless, you know as little about the real answer as you knew before. The discoveries are just part of the punishment, part of the eternal torment, they just keep you going after the carrot on the stick, but the carrot is always out of reach . . .
“Department heads’ meeting beginning now,” the automatic voice said.
Lee cocked an eye at the tiny device. “All right,” he said, getting up, “I’m going.”
The meeting was strictly routine. The reaction had set in. A week ago they had all been agog with the gravity-waves discovery. Now it had become apparent that the discovery had not opened the door they were trying to get through. We’re like children, Lee thought, trying to put together a stereo transceiver from an assembly kit; all the pieces are there, but we can’t get them together in the proper way.
It was a short meeting. As they broke up, Lee saw Richards walk over to Elaine.
“I hear you’re leaving us,” the young physicist said. “Going Earthside?”
“Yes,” Elaine answered. “For a while, at least.”
Richards broke into his feline grin again. “Good. I’ll be vacationing on Earth in a few weeks. Do you like to ski?”
“I haven’t skied in years . . .”
“There’s a lodge I go to in Switzerland. Really fine. And the skiing is marvelous. Even if you don’t want to ski, there are mountains to climb . . . and glaciers . . .”
Lee started toward them, thought better of it, and walked sullenly out of the room. He went to his office, sat fidgeting at his desk for a while, then called her on the intercom. She was not at her office or her quarters, so the equipment automatically paged her. When her face finally showed on the viewscreen, Lee could see that she was still in the conference room, which was now empty, except for her and Richards.
“What is it, Sid?”
“Uh . . . can you come down to my office for a minute? Right now?”
She quickly covered her surprise. “Of course. I’ll be right down.”
WITHIN a few minutes, she was entering his office. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” he said, gesturing her to a chair. “I just wanted to get you out of the grips of that All-American physicist.”
“What? Why, you jealous old goat!”
“Never mind. If you want to listen to propositions, please make sure I’m out of earshot.”
She laughed. “Is that what you brought me down here for?”
“Yes.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be cute.”
“He’s a very nice boy.”
He frowned. “All right, so I’m foolish and juvenile . . .”
“And he’s so interesting,” she went on, paying no attention. “He was telling me all about glaciers. In Switzerland. Near this ski lodge. Seems the glaciers have been growing during the past few years. Something I should really be sure to see.”
“Sounds fascinating,” Lee grumbled.
“Oh, it is. The glaciers, that is. They were retreating, you know, until a few years ago. Now they’re growing again. Goes in cycles, it seems . . .”
Lee suddenly stiffened. “Great God of our forefathers!”
“What now?”
Instead of answering, he scrambled out of his chair and went to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that lined one wall of the office.
“Sid, what’s the matter? Did I say something . . .”
But he was not listening to her. “That’s it,” he was muttering, “That must be it.”
Elaine watched him paw through the shelves of books, desperately searching for something.
“Can I help?” she asked.
“No. I think . . .” he snatched at a book and riffled through it. “Yes! Look at it!”
He wheeled and shoved the open book at her. She nearly dropped it as he ducked back around his desk and rummaged through a pile of papers.
“Here it is. Look at them!” he shouted, handing her a sheet of paper. “Put them side by side and look at them.”
The book was opened to a graph, Elaine saw, that showed the advance and retreat of the Ice Age glaciers over the past million years on Earth. The sheet of paper was Childe’s graph of the wave patterns of the machine’s antennas.
Her face went pale as she looked at the two graphs, side by side. “They . . . they’re the same . . . almost identical.”
“It all fits together now,” Lee said, drumming his fingers on the desktop in a restless tattoo. “The machine beams gravity waves into the interplanetary plasma between the Sun and Mercury. The effect is infinitesimal, by our short-term standards, but over a hundred thousand years or so, the cumulative effect must be enough to block off a small fraction of the Sun’s radiation. The Earth goes into a deep freeze for a few millenia!”
“But why?” Elaine asked. “Why did the Others build it?”
LEE paced nervously across the room. “Think a minute. They had beaten the Earthmen in a bitter interstellar war. They had done their best to wipe out the human race. What better way to insure their victory than by subjecting our homeworld to violent climate changes? They probably thought they were guaranteeing the complete extinction of mankind.”
“But the Ice Ages didn’t destroy man,” Elaine said.
“No. They reduced him to the level of a beast, though. Those few survivors of the interstellar war were robbed of their civilization. They had to go back to living in caves, to fighting the other animals for sheer survival. They made it, though, and re-learned what was lost, and built a new civilization.”
