Collected short fiction, p.258
Collected Short Fiction, page 258
“I don’t know,” his father said. “The conversion itself is very dangerous. Even when the subject is in perfect health, it is uncertain. With an old man, or a sick one, it would surely fail. That is why I cannot go.
“Even if you survived the conversion, both the remaining cubes are very much inferior to the one Barthu took, in both energy reserve and stability. It is not certain that either of. them would be able even to reach Persephone, without collapsing.
“The odds were greatly against success, even with No. 3. The approach of the nebula’s energy fields will make the outward voyage very perilous. It will be impossible for even the best cube to return, after the system has actually been engulfed in the cloud.
“Don’t forget that the cube is merely a construct of photons that are always tending to break out of field vortices, as radiant energy. It hasn’t the stability of matter. The impact of the nebular particles, or of any high-voltage quanta, will tend to break it up.”
“But let me”—Ivec gasped from his couch of pain—“try!”
His father’s haggard face smiled somberly.
“Consider the difficulties, my son. I have explained those that come from the imperfection of the cube. It may not be able even to reach Persephone. I think its energy reserve is insufficient to allow it to return at all.
“Another danger is that from Barthu Jildo. The photon body he took is superior to the others in every respect. His mind is yet brilliant, for all its warp. He will certainly oppose any attempt to take away his prize. He will have the power, and the ruthlessness, to destroy you.
“But most difficult is the third problem—of obtaining the details of the catalytic process. Since atoms elsewhere in nature do not break down in the peculiar way which we observe in the Blue Spot, I am sure that the process there is being controlled by intelligence. That intelligence will probably fear and mistrust seekers of its power. I believe that it will be hostile. And in the material-energy process it has a dreadful weapon.”
The old man’s bloodstained face was very grave.
“I want you to understand, my son, that between the three dangers—the cube’s instability, the insane hatred of Barthu Jildo, the hostility of the masters of Persephone—your chance of success is near mathematical zero.”
“Still,” whispered Ivec, “let me try. Not quite—zero!”
His father’s haggard face was briefly lighted with a weary joy.
“No Andrel,” he said, “has yet been beaten by a Jildo. I shall make ready No. 2.”
V.
IN A POOL OP PAIN, Ivec Andrel lay on a black, padded table in a darkened inner room. Massive electrical mechanisms loomed about him. A tube glowed dimly here in the shadows; there a bright surface gleamed. The sharp pungence of ozone was mingled with the smell of antiseptic from his bandages.
The photon cube rested upon an insulated stand near his bed. It was not clear like the other he had seen, hut murky, flickering. It was like the ghost of a great emerald, but flawed, about to shatter under some inner strain.
His new body. Anyhow, he thought, the agony would soon be ended.
“A few moments,” his father said softly. “Lie still.”
His father wheeled a bulky, darkly glistening instrument over him, a similar one over the cube. Thick cables connected them, coiled away to other mechanisms.
His father whispered, “Now, steady.”
A shrill, whining hum; an intermittent purple flicker of electricity. The ozone stung his nostrils. A white, blinding needle stabbed from the machine above toward his face, from the other toward the small green cube.
“A needle ray of positrons,” his father briefly explained, his voice calm, soothing—yet somehow betraying a private doubt, an agony of strain. “It is deflected back and forth by magnetic fields. When a positron strikes a free electron in your body, the two are annihilated, with the creation of two-million-volt quanta. Thus your body is scanned.
“The photons are trapped in special field cells, equipoised in stable wave systems, and projected into the corresponding position in the vortex web of the cube. Thus your life is transformed from the electron energy of matter to the quantum energy of light.”
The scientist had been busy with adjustments as he talked. The whining had changed, grown keener; the white needle had grown thinner, sharper.
“You are ready, my son?”
“Yes,” gasped Ivec. A new wave of torture came up from his broken body. He coughed feebly, sickened by the terrible flow of blood in his torn lungs. Through scarlet foam, he whispered, “Hurry.”
A rapping on the door. Then his father’s voice: “It’s Thadre. She wants to say good-by.”
“No,” breathed Ivec, bitterly. “This—her fault. Go ahead.”
His father touched his hand, as the black bulk of the machine descended. The whining grew sharper still. The white needle thrust toward his head. He closed his eyes, but its blinding radiance burned through the lids. Then, a thin blade of white agony, it probed into his brain.
A darkness struck him, heavy and thick as a physical wave. It drowned his senses—all save the sharp, thin pain of the stabbing ray. The darkness was shot with patches and zigzags of colored fire. A confused roaring ebbed and flowed. His whole body floated, as if on a river of roaring power.
Once he tried to move, to escape that probing needle. But his body was numbed, powerless. He relaxed into that black river—an instant or an eternity, he never knew. Then he had a vague, brief sense of dual identity, as the darkness and the roaring slowly faded.
He was one again. Light was about him once more. The thin agony of the ray receded, and abruptly he was aware of his surroundings.
He lay, naked and without pain, upon a smooth, hard surface. The dark bulks of the machines hung above him in the gloom, but they had shifted in position, so that the second, which had been upon his right, was now on the left.
He looked beneath it for the green cube. He saw the wheeled table, instead, with his father tenderly spreading a sheet over a supine, rigid form—a shape terribly familiar—his body.
With a clearing intuition, Ivec was suddenly aware of the cube as the home of his being. Vividly, he sensed each jewel-smooth face, each straight, sharp edge. He somehow felt the tumultuous, uneasy stir of the prisoned photons within it, the pressure of restrained energy processes. He was aware of the soft radiation flowing out, of his own control of it.
He dimmed the soft green rays, with an effort of will that soon became unpleasant—like the effort, in his old body, of holding the breath. He made them flare intensely, and again felt pain, as if from exhaustion.
“Careful, son.” His father stood straight, above his sheeted body. “You will soon master the control of the cube—field tensions and vibration axes are directly responsive to your will. But remember your limitations. You have but a certain stock of energy, and when that is gone you will have no source for any more.
“You must be cautious. Any violent or sustained exertion, any severe shock or strain, might disturb the delicately balanced dynamic tensions of the cube and cause its sudden disruption.
“Now try to move—at first just slightly. The effect is attained by shift of wave axes and disbalance of vector forces. But you need be aware only of the effort of will and the resulting motion.”
“Thank you, father. I will try.”
Ivec was aware that his effort to speak had created a vibration of the entire cube, which set up sound waves in the air to carry his words to his father.
He tried to lift himself. The cube rose with the thought—a paper thickness—an inch—three feet. He soared over the great machines, poised, settled very softly upon the sheeted, stiff form that had been his body—this morning so joyously strong, now broken, useless, dead.
But this body of photons was splendid, also. It responded to his will with the speed of light. He lifted one of the conversion machines half an inch; it must have weighed a ton. He focused a beam of energy on a metal shield, heated a little spot to cherry red. And a sharp, bright pain almost cleft the cube.
Dizzily, he was aware of his father’s grave warning: “Remember, energy loss can shatter the cube.”
THE DOOR flung open. Thadre Jildo burst into the room. She stopped abruptly, her fair face white and dreadful, a stiffening hand at her throat.
Her voice whispered, huskily: “It is—over?”
The old scientist nodded without speaking. She moved, came slowly across the room, her face stricken, set. She paused beside the sheeted body on the table, her lifeless eyes looking dully down at the photon cube lying like a great flawed emerald on the breast of it.
The cube stirred, quivered, as conflicting emotions surged through Ivec Andrel. He loved this girl—despite what she had done, for all that he was dead. Regret ached in him that he had refused to tell her good-by. An eagerness burned in him at her presence—and a leaden bitterness of frustration quenched it.
His voice spoke her name tremulously: “Thadre!”
She burst into tears at that, dropped beside the wheeled table. Pressing her face against the sheeted body, she sobbed wildly: “Ivec! Oh, my Ivec——”
Ivec, in the cube, rocked to the horror of ultimate frustration. Her quivering breast was against the glowing emerald surface. With a savage effort of will, he fought the dreadful yearning for the life of his own body again, to comfort the girl.
Softly, he slipped away, saying: “Good-by, Thadre, father. Good-by!”
The girl looked up at the cube with a cry of startled horror; then dropped her face again, weeping. His old father stood bowed and silent, his eyes dark with compassion.
Ivec fled away from his dead body, the weeping girl and his father. He flashed through an open window, out into the air. The sunlight was a golden river. He floated in it, drifting upward.
For a little time, high-over the laboratory, he paused. It was a little rectangular block, its metal walls silver and red upon the flattened mountain ridge. But his keener senses were still aware of his father and the girl, prostrate with grief.
A throbbing ache impelled him back. But there was nothing he could do. Their grief was for his body, and his body was dead. This cube was to his father merely a complex machine, to the girl apparently a thing of strangeness and horror.
His mind came back to his mission, which was greater than himself and his private loves.
His new senses were immediately aware of the vast, dark curtains of the nebula, like an ominous storm cloud, rushing upon the solar system. He could sense keenly the relative positions of the Sun and the nearer planets, and he could perceive, even in daylight, the brighter stars.
Persephone, his unthinkably distant goal, was far beyond the ken even of his sharpened senses. But he knew its position among the visible stars—near red Antares, in the Scorpion. With a last look at his father and sobbing Thadre Jildo, in the laboratory, he lifted the cube toward it with increasing acceleration.
VI.
STRAIGHT WESTWARD, Ivec Andrel flew, wingless, at the speed of his will. Away from the red morning Sun, toward the sinking, ashen disk of the waning Moon. The laboratory, the mountain, fell away behind. His range of vision vastly increased; the Earth became visibly convex.
Yet, to the delicate light sense of the cube, visual detail remained amazingly clear and intimate. With a wistful longing, an invincible sadness, Ivec looked back at the world of man—from which he was, now, forever, an exile, yet which he must spend his life to serve.
The bright roofs of lodges, where people came for rest and sport, were numerous in the green and gray of the mountains. Upon the plain beneath spread the green fields and orchards whose delectable fruits would forever rival the synthetic products of the chemists. Irrigation canals made a silver net; between them the tending machines moved almost intelligently.
The roadways were white, straight ribbons, where endless streams of vehicles flowed. He traced the long, unbending pencil of the vacuum tube, upon its spidery supporting towers.
Above the valley, yet far beneath the swiftly ascending cube, he saw the bright teardrops of pleasure aerodynes, floating. soaring, drifting with the wind.
As far as his vision reached were scattered the industrial city buildings, each a great pyramid structure, white-walled. green-terraced, with the factory space within and beneath the living-apartments.
As he flew higher—or as the curved Earth fell away from the straight line of his flight—the Pacific came into view. The vast, swelling curve of it was minutely indented with waves, like hammered metal, and the terminator beyond was a sweeping arc of darkness.
The coast crept back beneath him. He saw a great city, spread for many miles along the beaches and far up into the hills. The great communal buildings, of varied shapes and colors that formed one artistic whole, were set far apart upon green, rolling park lands.
Vehicles were thick along the streets and roadways. He sensed the busy stir of life within the buildings, the swift intercourse through tubes and beltways beneath the parks. Above all, the aerodynes were flashing, like colored drops in a living fountain.
Far out upon the sea’s sun-glinting blue convexity, he saw the white streamlined shapes of freight vessels; and the white walls of the floating cities, crowned with the feathery green of palms.
Vastly high above them, but still beneath the cube, hurtled the slender, silvery hulls of the rocket stratoliners, flashing from continent to continent.
A huge, diffused elation came to Ivec, to see all these evidences of busy, happy life. Power was the key to the splendor and the life of this modern world—power created by cooperative effort, and freely available to every man.
His vision found the endless gray dikes of the tidal power plants along the coast, the far-spreading black rectangles of the solar-electric plants in the desert lands behind him. His new senses could even perceive about him the energy of the planetary power field, that maintained all the activity he saw—that fed the life of the world.
All that was doomed, if he failed.
His mind saw the coming of the cold: The Sun grew red, was swallowed in endless night. Frost blighted the crops; snow blanketed the stricken world from pole to pole. The seas chilled and froze. The aerodynes fell, for want of power. The weather-control system failed, and icy blizzards raged upon the cities. For a time the buildings were lighted, warmed, with the small reserve of power. Then the lights went out. The planet, at last, was dark.
The dead face of Thadre Jildo was looking at him, its white loveliness frozen in a beseeching appeal. She seemed to matter more than all the world. He tore his mind from that vision of death. He must not fail. No matter what the odds, he must not.
HIS FLIGHT carried him higher. The ionized tipper layers of the atmosphere dropped from about him, wrapped the Earth in misty blue. In the new hard blackness of the sky, the stars shone minute and bright. The Sun’s rays and the cosmic radiation came with a stinging, painful force against the surface of the cube.
Ivec was aware of the nebula again. The nearer octopus-shaped spiral he had already seen, ice-blue with cold, reflected light; its streamers had already touched and reddened the Sun.
Beyond that, his new senses detected the major cloud—so vast that the solar system, plunging northward at twelve miles per second, would be lost in it for a hundred years. A black and ominous wall of menace, it blotted out the northern constellations.
He must return before it reached the system, or the cube, helpless amid its charged particles and tremendous energy fields, would be lost, destroyed. Ever more swiftly, he flashed ahead.
The swelling Moon had changed from a pallid, ashen disk to a sphere of blinding white, its craters and pitted plains harshly rugged. It grew swiftly. It was beside him. The frozen Earth would look like that, be thought, after the nebula was gone—cruel, bright, lifeless—if be failed.
With the Moon dwindling behind, he increased his speed again. The effort of motion now brought a gnawing, inner pain, that kept him ever conscious of the cube’s instability. Every expense of energy, be knew, must increase that agonizing flaw. Yet there was no time to spare; he tried to go still more swiftly.
The sunlight, cosmic radiation, positrons and other high-energy particles made a continual painful rain against the surface of the cube. Speed increased the pain of their impacts on the forward face. Enough of them, he knew, could shatter the cube.
Mars was in conjunction—lost behind the red, diminishing eye of the Sun. He crossed its orbit, flashed onward toward the region of the asteroids. He shifted his path, to cross to northward of the ecliptic plane—knowing that a violent collision with a material object would certainly disrupt the cube into a flare of radiation.
Jupiter, which was receding from opposition, he passed within ten million miles. An object of superb splendor, its white, swift-spinning sphere oblate, dark-belted, marked with the glowing red spot, encircled with its family of swinging moons.
Ivec was puzzled briefly at the apparent rapidity of its spin, at the hurtling velocity of the moons. Then he realized that, as a result of his speed, now tens of thousands of miles per second, he was experiencing the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, and the associated time extension. Precious time was rushing away, unsensed.
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto were all far from opposition; space was now open before him to remote Persephone, which was still invisible. Again he tried to increase his rate of motion, as much as the mounting agony from the cube’s instability would allow.
He was ever aware of the nebula’s advance, made apparently swifter by the retarding of his own sense of time. It spread across the constellations like a monstrous living thing, its sprawling black tentacles reaching out to seize Sun and planets.
Again and again he had encountered stray wisps of its cloud—streamers of its dusty particles, whose impacts brought him dazing pain, forced him to slow his speed. But the greater danger fell upon him without warning.
He was, lie knew, beyond the orbit of Neptune—although that planet, nearing conjunction, was five billion miles away. The Sun had dwindled to a minute disk that, through the haze of the on rushing nebula, looked red as a droplet of blood. The Earth was long since lost.
