Collected fiction, p.474
Collected Fiction, page 474
Possibly schizophrenic—I don’t know. We’ll head back to Low Chicago now. If we can integrate enough dope by morning, we can put it on the chief’s desk.”
DuBrose pulled out a smoke-tube from the instrument panel and inhaled deeply. His mouth was tight. Pell chuckled.
“Getting you, Ben?”
“A little.” More than that, really, when the disphragm is stiff and unsteady, and invisible bugs are crawling along the skin. DuBrose moved uneasily in the cushioned seat, while cogs slipped together without meshing in his thoughts.
“Cui bono?” Pell said. “It’s not our responsibility, remember.”
“Isn’t it?”
“We can’t solve the equation. We can’t find the man who can—unless Pastor’s the one. Only the chief is qualified to integrate the final factors.”
“Yeah,” DuRrose said, while the little bugs crept down his arms.
V.
Ripples broadened in the mirror. Concentric circles fled out from the locus, distorting Cameron’s face. He moved aside, watching the ripples gradually subside.
Then he moved again, directly before the mirror. When the image of his face hit the glass, the ripples started once more. He waited. They lessened and stopped.
Each time he blinked, however, minor circles began, one for each eye, spreading out over the smooth surface.
The angle of incidence is equal to—
Cameron looked at the tired face under its thatch of gray hair. He tried to keep his eyelids immobile.
Blink.
Ripple.
Quite impossible.
He turned away. He looked around the room. It was no longer a room to be taken for granted. Not the room he had known for years, in this house he had known for years. If the mirror betrayed him, so might the contoured, yielding floor. So might the billiard table. So might the glowing ceiling, and—
He turned sharply and mounted the stairs, without touching the escalator control. He wanted solidity under his feet, not the soft sliding motion that reminded him the earth was no longer quite as firm as usual.
His whole body jolted violently. Only rigid control kept him from—
It had been nothing much. He had mounted a top step that wasn’t there. That could happen.
Had he seen that intangible top step? He tried to remember and couldn’t.
This wasn’t the first time. When he was off guard, when he had forgotten, then that top step that wasn’t there would be there. Not tangibly. Not even visually, perhaps.
The visor was humming. Cameron reached it before Nela did. She shrugged and turned away, her sleek dark head suddenly terrible. Cameron stood with his hand on the switch, watching Nela walk back to her seat. He was wondering what he would do if a face, Nela’s face, should suddenly appear on the back of her head.
Or not Nela’s face.
He waited. He was afraid to stop looking until she had turned around. But it was Nela, with her cool, amused dark eyes and her tilted nose. He was glad she had never undergone rejuvenation.
Old, wise eyes were wrong, somehow, in too young a face. Attractive as Nela was, her face was mature, and very comforting now.
“Well?” she said, lifting her eyebrows. “Are you taking it?”
“Eh? Oh—” Cameron pressed the switch. The blunt, dark face of Daniel Ridgeley, the courier, checkered in, wrist raised to show the identification disk.
“Priority. Message from the Secretary of War—”
Cameron said coldly, “Seth Pell will receive it.”
Something exultant and gleeful flickered in those jet eyes. “The Secretary insists, sir—”
Cameron snapped the switch. The screen blanked. After a moment the humming started again.
Cameron turned off the set.
He put an elbow on the mantle and looked at nothing. His elbow slowly began to sink through the wood. He jerked away, glancing hastily at Nela. She was patting pillows into shape on the couch behind her.
She hadn’t noticed. No one noticed, ever. You couldn’t expect them to notice.
“You’re nervous,” Nela said. “Come and lie down here.”
“You’re the only one who’s seen it,” Cameron said. “Nela, I—”
“What?”
“Well—nothing. I think I’m overworked a bit. I’ll furlough pretty soon.”
He walked to the one-way windows. He could see out, into the moonlight speckling the tree-shadowed hillside, but no light filtered through those panes to attract enemy aircraft. If any aircraft could get past the coast barrages.
“Come and lie down.”
If he did, the couch might melt away beneath him. This room was too familiar. It was charged with latent horror. The familiar things were the ones that had betrayed him.
Better to be among unfamiliar things. If they behaved strangely, he might not notice it so easily.
Was that fallacious reasoning? Too specious? At least it was worth acting on.
He came behind the couch and kissed the top of Nela’s head. “I’m going out for a bit. Don’t wait up.”
“The boys called today. You haven’t seen the recording.”
“It’ll keep. How do they like the school?”
“They kicked, as usual. But they like it. They’re growing, darling. In those school uniforms—”
Nela laughed softly. “Remember?”
He remembered. Twins, fourteen years ago. They’d both been surprised. But they’d made plans, long-range plans—
He kissed Nela again and went out quickly. The copter took him to a Gate. A pneumocar shot him to Low Chicago, but not to his office. That, too, would have been familiar.
He found a valve and went out into the Spaces, automatically taking a light-tube from its rack, but slipping the cylinder into his pocket. Behind him the giant artery of the Way was a great Midgard Serpent coiling into the darkness.
Low thunders muttered around him. Under his feet the ground was gritty and hard. He went on slowly, staring around at the titans that served the city.
The pumps sighed and coughed; the heart of Low Chicago beat through the crimson gloom. Near him a mechanism of some sort rose and was lost in the shadow above. Out of blackness a piston, fifty feet in diameter, drove at him, hesitated, and shot back again. Forward it came, and back, forward and back, forward—
Lightning crawled across the vaulted ceiling that sheathed Low Chicago.
Br-r-rooom—thlock!
That was the piston.
Whssssss . . .
Compressed air.
Whroooom . . . whroooom.
Pump.
His feet scuffed through dusty slag. Something was moving down there. He crouched, staring at the things that slipped swiftly and noiselessly through the cinders, red and black—
Chessmen.
His hand went through them.
Subjective. The chessmen were walking about two by two. A projection of his thoughts, preoccupied with a land beyond the looking glass, where the expected did not always happen.
They were not there . . .
He did not look down again to make sure. Cameron swung around and walked hurriedly toward the nearest Way, not hearing the low thunder of the Spaces re-echoing all around him.
A valve opened; he stepped through and found a seat on one of the belts. His hand lay open on the padded arm. Suddenly something was thrust against his palm; instinctively his fingers tightened.
A metal cylinder.
He looked back. Already his chair was ahead of the seat on the slower belt that had briefly adjoined his. Daniel Ridgeley, the courier, was sitting there, jet eyes burning with excitement.
Cameron raised his arm and threw the cylinder straight at Ridgeley.
The courier lunged aside and caught it. His mouth opened in a soundless laugh.
The director’s finger touched a stud; the chair slid aside. Instantly Cameron was out of it, a reasonless cold panic filling him. Now he wanted familiar things, not the dim, strange vastness of the Spaces. And here was the infirmary annex, to his own department, a refuge against—
Against what?
He looked over his shoulder, but Ridgeley had vanished. The panic had not gone, though.
Cameron stepped into a lift and got off without noticing the floor. He stood looking into a dim, quiet room where a dozen beds made pale oblongs.
He came forward a few steps and paused, absorbing the peace that brimmed the room.
A nurse’s voice said, “All right?”
“All right,” Cameron said. “It’s the director.”
“Yes, Mr. Cameron—”
The lift sighed. A low humming began; that meant unauthorized intrusion. The nurse’s televised voice began to speak and broke off. Cameron swung around and began to back up.
He felt a door panel behind him. He groped for the knob, and it bent like putty beneath his fingers. Someone was coming along the hall outside, someone who was making staccato, harsh noises in his throat.
But at the other end of the room the lift’s barrier slid aside, and the stocky, hunched form of the courier stood there, shapeless in silhouette.
Behind Cameron, in the hall, someone, was going. “Kuk-k-k-k-k-k—”
Ridgeley came on. Cameron could see the cylinder in his hand.
The director let go of the useless doorknob. “You’re not allowed in here,” he said thinly. “Get out.”
“I’ve my orders. Priority.”
“See Seth Pell.”
“The Secretary of War told me to deliver this to you personally.”
With part of his mind Cameron realized how irrational this nightmare was. All he had to do was take the message and give it, unopened, to Pell. As simple as that. But somehow it didn’t seem quite so simple, with that bulky, squat figure plodding relentlessly forward.
“K-k-k-k-k-kuk!”
Ridgeley put the cylinder into Cameron’s hand.
The door behind the director opened, letting a shaft of pale light in. Cameron turned his head, blinking. Pell’s white hair gleamed as he stood staring, his hand tight on the shoulder of a young man wearing an infirmary bedsuit. The boy was shaking from head to foot, his eyes were closed, and the rasping, harsh noise was coming from his throat.
DuBrose was there, too, his young face strained. He pushed past Cameron into the dormitory.
Pell said, “Easy, Ben. Chief—”
“You’d better take this,” Cameron said, holding out the cylinder. “Kalender’s courier—”
The patient stopped shaking. The rattling clatter died in his throat. Without inflection, in a rapid, staccato voice, he said.
“Everyone is too short, flat people, but this new one . . . I saw him before . . . he reaches in the right direction, long, long, longer by far than anyone else here . . . not as long as the shining things but he is more complete in his duration—”
The boy stopped. DuBrose, facing Ridgeley, caught a new expression on the man’s face—something like wild, inexplicable delight.
“Sorry if I caused any disturbance,” the courier said smoothly. “But my job’s done. I’ll go now.”
Nobody stopped him.
An hour later Cameron was in Deep Sleep in his office, and Du Brose and Pell were working over Billy Van Ness. The boy was in third-stage hypnosis, and fragmentary words were beginning to emerge from the jumble of noises. But it took a long time before any coherent pattern became evident.
DuBrose spun the semantic integrator dial on the dictagraph and watched words form on a lighted screen. His lips moved as he read. He could hear Pell’s soft, unhurried breathing behind him.
“It isn’t ESP. then,” Pall said. “It’s ETP. Extra-temporal perception. That explains something that’s puzzled me. The patterns cases like Van Ness follow when they walk. Certain symptoms of disorientation. They’re just avoiding chairs that aren’t there at the moment, but either were or will be. They reach for objects that were moved a week ago. They’re disoriented in time—because they can sense duration.”
“It’s crazy,” DuBrose said.
Pell watched the screen. “See how this sounds. Some race far away in time made an expedition. I don’t know why. They must have been pretty unthinkably inhuman. Fifty million years in the future—or a hundred million. Maybe they faced extinction and took refuge in time instead of in space. They came here, twenty-two years ago, in the Duds. They didn’t survive. While they did, for an hour, they—talked?—in their particular way. Not with sound waves. Not with vibrations.
With hard radiations. Or perhaps they always emitted those radiations.”
DuBrose looked at the hypnotized boy and swallowed dryly. Pell’s cold, steady voice went on.
“Hard radiations. Genes getting knocked around—mutation. But a very queer kind of mutation.
The only kind possible. It was a sort of biological meeting of two utterly unlike species. Mental.
Gemis homo and genus—X!”
They were perhaps the ultimate adaptation of life on earth. Their race had never been human; they had sprung from other seeds in their own unthinkably long ago.
And they could move through time, in their own way. Not easily, for only under certain specialized, nearly unique conditions, could they exist at all.
Seventy-four temporal protective domes sprang into existence in the world of genus homo. From within those shells, genus X looked at a planet fantastically alien to them, as a human might regard the boiling gneiss raging across the seething crust of a molten earth.
And the hard radiations came out from the domes for an hour, radiations that were an integral part of the basic matrix of genus X. Human gene plasm responded. And was altered.
Before genus X passed, it had bequeathed to a few unborn specimens of genus homo certain latent abilities, wild talents not to be perceptible until the delayed maturation. And even then the powers of genus X would be all but useless to a merely human race.
The legatees could sense duration. But, by the time they were able to do that, they were hopelessly insane.
Pell said, “Some sort of energy must maintain what’s left of the Duds. These mutants sense that.
Or else they see—”
“What about Ridgeley?”
“I’ve checked the records. This is actually the first time any of these cases has ever roused from his lethargy except when near a Dud. Remember what this boy said when he saw . . . sensed . . . Ridgeley?”
“It’s integrated with the other stuff,” DuBrose said. “There are several possible conclusions.” He nodded toward the screen.
“Yeah. To somebody who can see duration, a baby must look plenty flat. No, I’m wrong. That would depend on the baby’s longevity. If he grew up to be a hundred, he wouldn’t seem so flat.
But Billy said everyone was too short except Ridgeley. Ridgeley reaches in the right direction, longer than anyone else who was in the infirmary then—but not as long as the shining things.
“The Duds. Wait a minute, Seth. If Billy here can sense duration, that might just mean that Ridgeley’s going to live to a ripe old age.”
Pell grunted. “Do you realize from how far in the future the Duds must have come? You can’t compare the heights of ants when you use Everest as the measuring stick. If Ridgeley’s duration is noticeably long to Billy’s perception, he must reach plenty far along temporal lines.”
“You’re jumping at conclusions. There’s not enough data—”
“You heard me question this boy. You heard the answers. Look how the integrator figures ’em!”
Pell jerked his thumb toward the screen. “What about that list? I asked our patient what he—senses—in this room, and—”
The list was complete and inaccurate. It included present furnishings, equipment that hadn’t been here for years, a diatherm that was scheduled to arrive next week, a centrifuge that had been on order for a month, and a great deal of material that wasn’t expected at all, including some gadgets that probably weren’t invented yet.
“Now doesn’t mean much to Billy Van Ness,” Pell said. “He’s told us what he senses in this room in the past, present and future. Look at the word association conclusions. It all points to duration, and Ridgeley’s tied up with it. I asked those questions with a purpose, Ben.”
DuBrose moistened his lips. “Well, then—what?”
“My guess is that Ridgeley may have come from the future. Not from the incredibly distant future of the Duds, but from one closer to us.”
“Seth, for Pete’s sake! There’s nothing to prove—”
“No proof at all. I know. And the only proof I may ever be able to get will probably be empirical.
But it’s the only answer that fits all the terms.”
“You could pluck an answer out of the air for any problem,” DuBrose complained, “if you ignore probabilities. You could say Ridgeley’s a goblin who’s found Aladdin’s lamp!”
“I’m not saying anything definitely. This is a theoretical solution. Nothing more. Billy Van Ness has ETP. His duration comparisons indicate that Ridgeley doesn’t compare with radium half-time but about equals iron. If the boy were a metallurgist I could learn more. I don’t know what grade of iron he has in mind. But, roughly, the life expectancy of ordinary iron equals Ridgeley’s duration, as Billy’s ETP sees it.”
“How long does iron last?”
“Find out. Come in my office, will you?”
There Pell put in a televisor call, a request for information on Daniel Ridgeley. “Now we’ll wait and see. Sit down, Ben. What do you think?”
DuBrose dropped on cushions. “I still think you’re jumping at conclusions. There might be other explanations. Why jump at the wildest possibility?”
“Yet you didn’t cavil at the idea that the Duds might come from the future.”
“That’s different,” DuBrose said illogically. “They don’t do anything. What’s Ridgeley trying to do? Upset the apple cart? Is he following Kalender’s orders?”
“The Secretary of War is a brass hat, but he’s no traitor. Ridgeley could be—probably is—acting on his own initiative. He may be in enemy pay. All along, Ben, I’ve been puzzled by one point: how the Falangists could have worked out this equation. They’re not from the future. Their technology isn’t much more advanced than ours, if at all. We live on this side of the world; the Falangists live on the other; but we’re contemporaries. They’re neither supermen nor are they from a super future. They’re people like us. But Ridgeley—well, I think he’s from the future, and he’s butting into a fight that doesn’t concern him. Or maybe it does, somehow. I don’t know.” Pell grimaced. “Well, I’m hungry. Let’s order up some chow. We’ve been running around all night, and it’s 3 A.M.” He spoke into the mike, after switching off the force-field that guarded his desk.
