Collected short fiction, p.276
Collected Short Fiction, page 276
“We must hasten, Ron,” the thin voice rasped from his fear-dried throat. “There is no time for any test. They are seeking now to enter the ship. We must try it, to escape—or perish!”
RON GONEEN led the way to the tiny bridge. It was bitterly cold, even within the vessel. And the strange, thick darkness had come into the chamber outside. The lamps were gone. He could just distinguish the dim, silvery sphere of the Jewel of Dawn, which he had laid ready on the bench across the end of the chamber.
He remembered its shimmering beauty, which he had rolled so often in his palm. Could it be actually a minute universe, complete, a haven for a new mankind? That seemed incredible, but still——
“Start it!” gasped Seru. “Now—or they might take the jewel! Now! To freedom—or death!”
The space captain touched a key. The atomic generators responded with a soft humming; the meters indicated that half their output was flowing into the Kardishon oscillator.
But he felt nothing, no change of size. He shook his red, shaggy head at Seru Gyroc. “Nothing,” he whispered. “I guess we’ve failed——”
“No. There’s no disintegration.” Then the other’s cracked voice was suddenly sharp with excitement. “Look! The walls——”
Ron Goneen peered through the observation ports. The walls of the sealed chamber had become visible again, shining very palely with a familiar, eerie blueness. They seemed very far away—still receding.
“The room seems larger!” he cried. “No—of course, it is we who are smaller!”
“One way of putting it is as true as the other,” said Seru, “remembering the relativity of size.”
“But it worked—it really worked!” the space captain rumbled eagerly. “We didn’t disintegrate! We’re safe!”
“We’re growing smaller,” admitted the little scientist. “But we aren’t saved yet! First, we don’t know that the Kardishon Effect can be carried on infinitely. Second, we don’t know that we can actually enter the smaller universe. We may be lost outside it! Third, there is no assurance that its planets—if it is a universe and has planets—will satisfy the conditions of human life.”
Steadily, as he spoke, the bluish walls receded. Their hue changed to a dull, sinister red, and then was lost in darkness—through a relative change in the wave length of light.
Only the gem from Andromeda remained visible: an expanding bubble, always shining with the same silvery white, floating in a chasm of darkness.
“Better keep near it,” warned Seru, “or we’ll be lost in size. Our old inches are growing into light years!”
The big space captain started the kappa-field drive. The diminishing vessel lifted from the now invisible floor—lifted upon the strange, interminable voyage from universe to universe. The silvery sphere hung in black and utter emptiness, always growing. Steadily, he drove the Life of Man toward its surface. And steadily grew the intervening space, so that the voyage began to seem like a fantastic flight to nowhere.
MANY HOURS, Ron Goneen was thinking, had already passed on that uncanny flight—when it came to him that time, as well as space and size, had its meaning strangely twisted on such a voyage as this.
He left the controls with Seru, after the old man had rested, and went to look after Lethara. He found her awake again, lying quietly in her bunk. Some of the horror had gone out of her eyes, but she seemed very pale and tired.
He tried to put a little cheer in her.
“We’re voyaging to another world, my darling!” he whispered. “When you see the light of a sun, and smell the clean air of some warm, blue sea, and watch green cover the hills of a new planet in spring—just wait and see how good you’ll feel!”
Her white head shook weakly on the pillow. “Ron, my dear,” she breathed, “you don’t understand. I tried to live—but I’m too old. Somehow the other life made me old. I’m older than any human being ever was! And I desire nothing but rest. Kiss me, and let me sleep——”
He kissed her lips, and they seemed icy cold again.
The haggard, gaunt form of Seru Gyroc, when he returned to the bridge, stood rigid before the instruments.
“We are near the crucial point,” he said. “We must break through the shell while we are yet relatively large—while there is power enough. The kappa lines interact with the geodesics of the other universe. We must make the field strong enough to merge them. Speed up the generators!”
Still the Life of Man plunged through uttermost darkness toward the silvery bubble—which now had become infinitely huge, so that its surface was like an illimitable flat mirror.
Ron Goneen increased the power of the generators, until their soft humming became an ear-piercing whine. The vessel leaped forward, toward that mirror film. And it bent before them, yielding like an elastic sheet.
“More power!” cried Seru. “And hold fast! There must be a shift of dimensional axes. We see now only a three-dimensional section of the other universe. The merging world lines must rotate our fourth axis into it!”
Grimly, Ron Goneen pushed the control lever forward all the way. The tiny ship shuddered and rang to the vibration. His feet stung on the deck. He felt a sudden apprehension for Lethara and——
Then that yielding elastic film seemed to snap toward him—and it was gone! At the same instant the ship lurched queerly, in some direction that was neither to right nor left, up nor down.
Giddy from that unexpected, oddly disquieting lurch, he clung to a hand rail, peering bewilderedly about for that shining barrier. It was not behind them. It was nowhere.
And the vessel was plunging, with generators screaming at full power, through a featureless void of utter darkness. He groped hastily for the control levers, shut them down to cruising speed.
“So we’re through?” he gasped incredulously. “We’re in the other universe? And nothing to do but find a nice friendly galactic system, and a good solid planet of the right chemical order?
“I must go tell Lethara——”
THE space captain’s eager voice stopped suddenly, with a little gasp of apprehension. For Seru Gyroc had made no reply. His eyes were fitted to the twin lenses of a compact binocular telescope.
Ron Goneen bent to gaze into Seru’s haggard face, saw it etched with new despair. Fearfully, Lon demanded: “What is it, Seru?”
Still the scientist made no response, except for a weary, hopeless little jerk of his white head.
Anxiously, Ron Goneen peered through another port. “Why is it so dark?” his husky whisper rasped. “The thermometers show almost absolute zero. Why? Why are there no stars, no galaxies—anywhere?”
His big hand seized Seru Gyroc’s thin shoulder, spun him away from the telescope. “Tell me!” he demanded. “Is it because we are yet too large to see!”
“No,” came the dry, weary breath. “We are small enough. But we have failed.” His white head shook very slowly. “We should have expected it, from the relativity of time. For time obviously must have flowed much faster in this tiny universe—so long as it had any time!”
The space captain’s big body sagged wearily back against the bulkhead. “Time——” his dry lips said soundlessly. “Too late——”
“Too late,” quavered Seru, “by a billion, billion years. This universe has reached the fate from which the Omega Effect experiment was designed to save our own. It has run down. It has reached thermodynamic equilibrium, a state of maximum entropy.
“Its stars have all been disintegrated into energy. And the energy has wasted itself, in ever-longer, ever-weaker waves, through an infinitely expanding space. Its smallness, after all, was only in our own perspective.”
He sighed again, hopelessly.
“No, this universe is what it looks—frozen, dark, dead. There is no longer any change, nor will there ever be, unless the conditions of energy probability happen to be reversed. Even time, determined by the arrow of entropy, has ceased to flow.”
Ron Goneen’s blue eyes, dull and bloodshot, stared wearily out into empty, boundless darkness.
“So we have failed,” he whispered.
“Failed Lethara——”
“That is so.” The old scientist nodded. “We have come from one extreme to the other. We can drive the ship onward until our fuel is gone—until we perish of old age—and never meet anything but darkness and cold and changeless death.”
Beside him, then, Ron Goneen went suddenly tense, “But look!” he gasped.
“I saw—— I saw——” He leaped to the oculars of the powerful little telescope.
XII.
BREATHLESSLY trembling, too fearful to let himself hope, the big space captain stood with his eyes fastened to the lenses. Using the full aperture of the instrument, he searched the void ahead. For a long time he saw only cold, black emptiness.
Then it came again: a gleam of purple light! It was infinitely tiny, infinitely remote, infinitely brief—like the flash of a single, bombarded atom, he thought, in the spinthariscope.
Tugging vainly at his mighty arm. Seru Gyroc was demanding, “What is it? What do you see?”
“Wait!” Ron Goneen was still peering intently. “It seemed so faint. I can’t be sure!”
Another cruel eternity of darkness—and then it winked again!
“It is a light!” he cried eagerly. “A tiny, flashing light!”
Seru Gyroc ran startled fingers through his strangely whitened hair. “That is very singular!” he whispered. “A light in this universe that seemed so dead! What could have kept alive, against the current of entropy, so long?”
“There it is again!” called Ron Goneen from the telescope. “A purple spark that winks like a signal beacon!” He moved suddenly toward the controls. “I’m going to set the ship toward it We’ll find out what it is.”
“Caution!” The old man’s trembling fingers closed on his big shoulder.
“No natural phenomenon could have survived to cause the intermittent emanation of light in a universe so old as this. That flashing represents intelligence—intelligence that has endured for aeons beyond conception!” His cracked voice was hoarse with awe.
“To have survived at all, when all else is dead, it must be supremely great. And it must have survived by defending itself. It may destroy us!”
Th space captain shook his shaggy, reddish head. “No risk is too great now. For we have nothing to lose—no other hope. And there is everything to gain! A haven where Lethara can recover, a home for the race to come——”
His big fingers dropped to the dials.
“If that intelligence is so great, perhaps it is great enough to share its knowledge. I believe that the signal was meant for a welcome and a guide.”
“Or a trap,” said Seru. “But go ahead. As you say, there is nothing else.”
Ron Goneen lifted and swung the prow until that flashing atom of purple fire was dead ahead. When they were driving toward it, he left Seru at the controls and went back to the galley to prepare a tray for Lethara.
She was sleeping when he entered her cabin. His light step roused her, however, and she called to him before he could withdraw.
“Ron!” Her voice was feeble, yet deep with an indwelling dread. “Ron—please come and hold my hand, I had such a fearful dream!”
He set the tray down beside her.
“Here, my darling. Drink this. It will make you warm. And forget your dream!”
“But I can’t forget it!” Huge and dark with abiding terror, her violet eyes fixed on his face. “It was too real to forget. It was more real than you are, standing here beside me.”
Her thin body shuddered on the couch; the dilated eyes stared away, as if at some ghastly thing beyond the walls.
“Hold my hand, Ron!” she whispered. “I don’t want to leave you. Hold it tight!”
Her haggard face smiled a little, at the pressure of his fingers. Her great eyes stared up into his face, suddenly serene and calm, with the enigmatic simplicity of a child’s.
“I thought in the dream that I was dead,” she said. “And the Life of Man came down out of dark space, upon some cold, dead planet. You and my father dug a grave in its frozen rocks, laid me in it, and filled the grave. You took the name plaque from the ship and left it at the end of the mound, under that starless sky. And you went away. And I was dead and alone in that world of death, forever——”
Her husky whisper died away. Her thin, cold fingers, which had tightened in a grip almost convulsive, slowly relaxed. Her great, dark eyes closed, and her pale body lay motionless.
Ron Goneen leaned over her, frightened. “Lethara?” he breathed. “My darling——”
Her eyes opened, then. She smiled at him wanly. He sat beside her, holding her cool fingers in a grasp almost fearful, until she had gone quietly to sleep again.
“RON!” the thin voice of Seru Gyroc quavered through the speaker system. “You had better come back to the bridge.”
He slipped away from the girl—still smiling faintly in her sleep—and hurried forward, demanding. “We are near?”
“The photometers show that the brightness of the flashes has increased four hundred times,” the old scientist reported. “Which means, by the inverse square law, that we have come nineteen twentieths of the distance.”
Ron Goneen was peering with narrowed blue eyes through a port, when the strange beacon—if it were a beacon—ceased its blinking and became a steady, purple point.
“See it!” whispered Seru. “That shows intelligence—aware of our approach!”
The big space captain towered alert at the controls. The solitary star became swiftly bright, and he decreased their speed accordingly. Still it was but a tiny, burning atom, alone in a gulf of empty blackness.
“We are near,” Seru announced from the photometer. “A few miles more and——”
Eyes now against the oculars of the telescope, Ron Goneen watched the beckoning point. Slowly, it expanded to a tiny, reddish-purple moon. Dimly, at last, he could see its light cast on other objects.
“A great black sphere!” he rumbled.
“Like a tiny, armored planet—— The beacon is on a metal tower!”
“Armored!” Seru caught up the word. “Yes, it must be armored—against the loss of heat! For available energy is very precious here—even the stored energy of matter itself! Do you see any entrance?”
The Life of Man still slipped toward the light. Ron Goneen studied that black, armored ball. Several miles in diameter, it was yet tiny, he thought, to be the sole citadel of life in all a universe.
“No—yes!” His voice was suddenly tense and eager. “A slit is opening at the base of the tower—a great valve! A pale light is shining through.”
“Some intelligence is opening it for us!” cried Seru. His hollow, bloodshot eyes darted sharply at the space captain. “It may be a trap!” he said. “Remember: the very matter of the ship and even of our bodies is precious, in this universe! Worth any crime——”
“I remember,” said Ron Goneen, quietly. “But we shall enter. There is nothing else——”
Pale-white light, dimly reflected from the walls of the passage, showed the sphere to be of metal, not in reality black, but polished to a brilliant, silvery luster.
Now fully open, the mighty valve revealed a cylindrical well nearly a hundred feet in diameter. Without hesitation, Ron Goneen nosed the Life of Man gently into it.
“Strange to think,” he said suddenly, “that all this is happening inside a halfinch jewel that I used to carry in my pocket!”
“But is it?” said Seru. “Remember our rotation of axes, and the relativity of size——” His cracked voice broke oil, to gasp, suddenly, sharp with alarm, “But look! In the periscope—behind us!”
Ron peered into the tube, saw that the disk of blackness behind them was swiftly vanishing. The two halves of the great valve swung together as he watched, to form a solid wall of silvered metal.
“Trapped!” gasped Seru.
Ron Goneen’s rugged, red-bearded face remained impassive. His steady fingers guided the little ship onward through the tube, toward another massive valve that closed the way ahead. Calmly, his deep voice rumbled, “We shall see.”
XIII.
AS THE big space captain’s tanned fingers brought the Life of Man to a stop, a line suddenly cleft the metal wall ahead. The two halves slid ponderously black, to reveal another section of the silvered passage.
Again he sent the little vessel forward, until they were once more stopped by a third barrier. The substance of it was unfamiliar, dead-black, lusterless.
As they waited before it, Seru said, “Whatever intelligence may dwell here is well shielded, indeed, against the loss of energy. Otherwise it must have perished a billion years ago.”
The black wall also divided, in its turn, and they glided through into the last section of the tube. In view beyond its mouth lay an extraordinary space: the hollow interior of the armored globe. Fully a mile in diameter, as Ron Goneen estimated, it was crowded with enormous, enigmatic machines, nearly all of silver-white metal that was polished to mirrorlike perfection.
“The high polish conserves light and heat,” commented Seru. “You perceive that the actual illumination is very feeble. Energy is precious here—so precious that I fear for our own!”
Conscious of some strange depression, Ron Goneen struggled to analyze it, as he sent the vessel gently ahead toward the circular opening of the passage. It came to him suddenly.
Turning to Seru with a little shudder, he said, “This place is queer—dead! There is no sound. There’s no whir or throb of energy. Those big machines don’t move; they haven’t turned for a million years!”
But the old man shook his haggard white head. “No,” he quavered, “the flashing of the beacon and the opening of the doors is evidence enough of life. There is simply no energy to waste on friction and vibration. Eh——”
He stopped with a gasp, and Ron Goneen reached abruptly for the controls. For the gently gliding craft had come abruptly to a halt.
“We’ve struck something!” Puzzled, Ron Goneen shook his red head. “Some invisible barrier across the opening——” His deep voice went suddenly tense. “But, look! There’s something moving—coming toward us!”
