Orbit 3 - [Anthology] Read online

  All hands were standing before the stereo screen and all but Svirsky looked at Gard with narrowed eyes, then back to the screen in silence. Gard saw with relief that his Protean was still a captive, squatting and shuffling the sticks. Then, as he watched, a melon dropped through the side of the problem box. The Protean reached for it, began eating. The dispensing counter on the box registered zero.

  “He does it by random action.Real random,” Pete Minelli said. He did not smile.

  “This does it, you fool,” Onderdonck said thickly. “Now we’ll vote.”

  “Ed, agree to lift out right now,” McPherson pleaded.

  Gard declined. McPherson and Minelli voted with Onderdonck. The fat man, flushed with triumph, looked at Chalmers.

  “I don’t know, Webb,” the biochemist said slowly. “It was bumping against something like this I was hoping to avoid, I think. But now maybe none of us are fit to go back to earth.”

  “We can regain sanity,” Onderdonck urged. “Something shielded us from this until that brainsick fool—”

  “We’ve got to make a token fight, now,” Chalmers interrupted. “I’ve seen it happen. Each in his own way, perhaps, we must make our fight here, get our teeth into this thing.”

  “Gard, I feel almost a duty tokill you!” Onderdonck cried. “You loosen the bonds of Creation itself, you fool, you fool!” He looked apoplectic.

  “Give me the rest of the ship-day,” Gard said. “I’m scared too, Onderdonck. We’ll lift out by six.”

  Onderdonck and Minelli left the workroom. The four others watched the Protean repeat his performance seven more times and then rest, apparently sated. Gard and Chalmers cut the record-tape into the nine sequences and fed them through the pattern analyzer, first in parallel and then singly for correlation. The highest reading was point sixteen.

  “That’s more random than pure chance,” Chalmers said. “That may give us a handhold.”

  “No human action can be purely random,” Svirsky agreed. “Causality is structured very basically into our wiring diagram, perhaps as far back as the Permian. We can’t even perceive pure randomness in our world.”

  They talked around the subject. “I want to help,” McPherson said finally, “but I can’t make out how we’re going to come to grips with this business. What’s the Protean wiring diagram like?”

  “I have a notion, from work on lower life-forms,” Svirsky said. “I should dissect that fellow in the cage.”

  “No,” Chalmers said. “He’s para-human, at the least. How about depth photos?”

  Svirsky agreed that might do. They decided to anesthetize the Protean, make depth photos for analysis on Earth, and lift out. Chalmers thought neuralin might not work well in Protean biochemistry and said he would persuade Onderdonck and Minelli to come along and help if restraint were needed. It was one o’clock, ship-time.

  “If neuralin works too well, they can help carry back the body,” he said. “I wouldn’t object to taking a dead Protean back to Earth.”

  * * * *

  Onderdonck and Minelli carried pistols to the cage. Gard went in alone with the neuralin gun. The red-bearded Protean moved to one side, not looking at Gard, and suddenly ran for the door. Gard flung out his powerful left arm and the Protean ran through it.

  The men at the door jumped aside. Onderdonck aimed his pistol and Svirsky struck it up. Gard came out, pale and shuddering.

  “I can’t describe it,” he said. “Like being violated in a secret place I couldn’t know existed. God! My flesh crawls! I’ll go home now, Onderdonck.”

  “Too late,” Onderdonck said, pointing his pistol.

  They saw a file of naked Proteans emerging from shrubbery between them and the ship, cutting them off, bearing down obliquely. Minelli cursed and drew his pistol.

  “Not yet, Pete,” Svirsky said gently. “Into the cage, my brothers.”

  Inside the closed cage they watched the Proteans, led by a huge, red-bearded male, circle them on a ten-yard radius. When the leader cut through the incoming file to close the circle the Proteans set up an uncadenced howling.

  The leader led the file through itself and into a second circle of greater radius. Women and half-grown children spaced randomly with men kept coming in on the long secant. They stepped high and deliberately, arms hanging, howling from expressionless faces. The leader drew a third loop and then a fourth that lost itself in far trees and hollows. Still they came in on the long slant.

  Gard climbed the cage wall to look over their heads. “It looks like a logarithmic spiral,” he shouted down. Onderdonck cursed steadily. Svirsky and Chalmers talked into each other’s ear against the howling.

  After nearly an hour the incoming file ended. The spiral unwound out of sight and the howling died away. The men left the cage.

  Minelli laughed uncertainly. “Well, that didn’t hurt much,” he said.

  “God, things seem still and silent after that war dance,” McPherson said. “Let’s go home, men.”

  He led off, the others at his heels. After a few steps Chalmers cried “Stop!”

  “Things don’t look right,” he said. “See those trees ahead.”

  “Blurry and jumping a little,” Gard agreed. “Easy now.”

  “Twisting in circles,” McPherson murmured. “It’s scary.”

  “Danger,” Chalmers said quietly. “Back by the cage.”

  From the cage everything looked all right again. It was Protean midafternoon, with a few cumulus clouds overhead. No breeze stirred the gray-green leaves, no birds flew.

  “What kind of danger, Hank?” Gard asked.

  “Ignorance is danger now. All we know yet is that some influence unstructures our perception, makes the world look like an impressionist painting.”

  “Monet sweated to achieve that vision. Where’s the danger?”

  “Van Gogh had that vision thrust upon him,” Chalmers said crisply, “and it ended by killing him. Let’s map out the boundary and mark it with twigs. We’ll be our own instruments.”

  The boundary was a rough circle. The men looked at Gard.

  “Now what, Hank?” McPherson asked Chalmers.

  “We need more data,” Gard said. “Have to know how bad it gets. Maybe it’s a belt that lets up again. I’ll go out alone, a little further. You watch me, but don’t come after me whatever happens.”

  He walked into the zone like a boxer into the ring, his symmetrical athlete’s torso gleaming in the sun.

  * * * *

  Gard screamed and threshed as they dragged him in by the cage.

  “Come out of it, Ed!” Chalmers barked, slapping him. “You’re all right.”

  Gard sat up and shook his head. The others bent above him.

  “You wandered like a tapeless robot out there,” McPherson said. “When you stumbled back in you flopped and screamed. What happened?”

  “First the blur and the vibration of visual things,” Gard said slowly. “Then everything came alive and the sky was a big face and I couldn’t bear it any more and then snap—the dream.”

  “What did you dream?” Chalmers asked.

  “A true thing, Hank, out of my past. When I was ten I fell from a concrete bomb ruin. Part way down rusty rods caught me under the left arm pit and shoulder blade, tore up the brachial plexus—that’s how I got this lopsided look and the gimp arm. I hung there—Christ it was awful, living that again!”

  He stroked his withered left arm with a wry smile, then stood up.

  “Well,” Chalmers said. “Disintegration of the world-gestalt. Sudden hypermnesic regression to an earlier personality configuration at a point of trauma. No physical harm, but the subject is incapacitated for rational behavior in present time. I generalize from one instance, as I shouldn’t. Words are comforting, but these are only whats. Who’ll offer a how?”

  “I’ll try,” Svirsky said. “The Proteans may have a kind of action-space inconceivable to us and probably not conceptual with them. They have thrown a barrier around this island of ou
r own action-space—”

  “Blank nonsense!” Onderdonck broke in. “Gard is a brainsick fool, that’s what and how both. He’ll take Webb Onderdonck no further!”

  The fat man held a stick from the cage and he shook it toward the ship.

  “I can see the ship,” he said. “This is some kind of optical razzle-dazzle, but where this stick can go Webb Onderdonck can follow. I’ll close my damned eyes!”

  He strode off, jabbing the stick angrily into the ground ahead of him with each step.

  “There walks a man braver than he is able to know,” Svirsky said softly.

  They drew together and watched him go, stick jabbing, undeviating, and tension rose and gripped them in a great collective shudder.

  “Their action-space overpowers our own, limits us and frees us in ways inconceivable.”

  “But how? There’s danger, God knows we all five feel it now, but let’s put a finger on it,” Chalmers said.

  “Death, maybe,” Gard said. “When I fell, I caught a ledge with my fingers. It seemed to me I deliberately let go. When I hung on those rods I screamed as much in frustration as in pain.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe the thing that says ‘I’ can’t bear disintegration of the symbol system. Maybe it is the symbol system, something emergent at a high level of abstraction and integration, oh dammit, something modulated onto the body’s life like information on a carrier wave, a thing of words only—don’t mind me, people. I’m talking in tongues.”

  “Hardly a revelation. But go on.”

  “All right, in desperation out there we might become able to flash back along ourselves to a point of danger and tip the scales for death. I tell you, I felt it!”

  “The pain I grant you, but not the danger. Suppose you had killed yourself, aged ten. Then you couldn’t have made that unauthorized tape-substitution and we wouldn’t be here. But we are here.”

  “Someone else would have done it, perhaps you.”

  “That’s changing the past,” McPherson said angrily.

  “The past would be intact all the way back to Creation, for all you could ever determine,” Gard said. “But I’d be dead.”

  “I just can’t think it, Ed.”

  “None of us can think it in our bones and muscles, Ike,” Svirsky said, “but we can still talk about it in words. Listen now, not with your muscles. Each of us is a world-line in a four-dimensional continuum that contains a certain irreversibility. To know ourselves, we segregate the irreversibility into one dimension and call it time. Then we experience ourselves as free in the other three dimensions. Suppose now, not with your muscles, that the Proteans handle the irreversibility differently. They have made a cage for us, as we for them, but of their own world-stuff.”

  “Show me a crucial test for that hypothesis and I’ll buy it, Joe,” Chalmers said. “But you do give me an idea. We have long known how language both structures and reflects the structure of the microcosm which we project into the world and what a social process it is. We may be able to overcome this disintegrating influence by going out in company and talking constantly.”

  “Not all of us,” Gard said sharply. “We might all flash back and get hurt or die and this trip would never have been. I won’t have that.”

  “You mean to coerce history by holding back a hostage? I talk in words, I talk in words!”

  “Yes. There may also be a least action factor that makes prevention of suicide more probable than bodily replacement.”

  “I wish we could cancel this trip!” Minelli burst out. “That guy Onderdonck that broke his back ski-jumping just before we left must’ve known what he was doing. God knows howwe’ll end.”

  “I see your point, Ed, but I prefer to call it a control. Whom shall we leave?”

  “Joe and yourself,” McPherson said. “In time you two will hammer this thing out flat, I feel it. We can’t risk you.”

  Chalmers demurred and was shouted down. Gard’s right hand clasped McPherson’s left strongly. Minelli had firm hold of Gard’s left wrist. The three men moved out, talking steadily.

  * * * *

  Look, the tree’s blurry. Pete, Pete, pick out the leaves. Keep seeing the leaves, well the branches then don’t let it get solid pull off a twig man feel it bite it bleeding the tree screamed bending at me the earth the grass pull it bleed ingand foldingover God’seyeupthen .. .

  . . eat mud, Ed Gard. You said it’s no different up here than on the ground.”

  “Must be a hundred-foot drop.”

  “So the I-beam is still just as wide as the one you walked down below. With your eyes closed, down below. Eat mud, Ed Gard.”

  “I’m scared. But I won’t eat mud.”

  “Eat mud, Ed Gard.” .

  “Here goes, damn you. Just as wide, nothing to it . .

  . . . armsthrashingco lorsflashing the fear the fear jerking him along past lump trees a man too, and there Svirsky reaching out, the zone, of course, clearing now, all right now.

  * * * *

  Mary Gard let go of Vane’s hand and looked ruefully at Chalmers.

  “Well, Hank, talking doesn’t help,” she said.

  “That’s data too, Mary. What did you experience, Chuck? Time suicide?”

  “Hell no,” Vane said. “We talked and things went horrible anyway and then bang, we were still talking, but it was back in my office in Denver. A real memory-dream, like. Mary was just telling me about Ike McPherson being arrested for rape and it was an hour before lift out. She was crying.”

  “Can you really cry, Mary?” Chalmers asked.

  “Tears of rage, Hank,” Mary said. “I couldn’t bear being thwarted. Even with only Chuck and I knowing the secret, the jinx still worked. Onderdonck broke his back and Minelli got cut up in a tavern brawl and that was all right, we could go short-handed. But we had to have a shipman.”

  “She knew I was licensed,” Vane took up the story. “She said it was Earth’s last chance to solve the mystery of Proteus and she wouldn’t let it go, was I a man or a mouse, and me saying I’d be busted out of the Corps and my wife screaming mad and both of us still saying it as she dragged me up the gangplank.”

  “That doesn’t support your death-urge hypothesis, Mary,” Chalmers said.

  “Mine does again. Maybe it’s just me,” Mary said. “I went back to an experience of my father’s, a bad fall that kept him out of school for a year. It was eerie—death waiting and a kind of voluptuous wanting to fall. I could feel myself taunting myself into it, swinging myself into vertigo, yet it was my father all the time.”

  “But your father survived. Even granting that your consciousness can cross a world-line synapse into a parent, you haven’t changed anything. Chuck’s experience was innocuous. Our solid evidence indicates only loss of awareness and coordination in present time.”

  “Even so, that’s dangerous,” Vane said. “We couldn’t man the ship in that state. The wolf-things or even the Proteans could eat us alive.”

  “Chuck, that’s the how!” Mary cried. “Remember how the Proteans seem to paralyze or uncoordinate the goat-things they sometimes eat? I’ll bet they just run around them. Remember how they walked around us and we felt angry and had headaches and how I conked out and got bitten on my bad arm? They were trying to put us in cages then and we were too strong. So now they’ve done it massively. It’s as if we’d made our cage out of armor plate after the first one failed.”

  “That’s part of the what, not the how,” Chalmers objected, “and your argument is from analogy—”

  “Which may be perfectly goodProtean logic,” Svirsky interrupted. “It’s a Protean cage we’re in. No how will satisfy you until we reduce it to touch and kinesthesis. But this how is different. Consider, our bodies are not caged but our minds are.”

  “How can a mind becaged?” Vane asked.

  “When we know, we will escape,” Svirsky said. “We must play a word game now apart from muscle-thinking. We are in a time trap. Here in our cage our entrop
y increases. I am thirsty. I feel the heat of that sun, but I marked the cage shadow after our first alarm and in all our scramblings since that sun has not moved.”

  Chalmers paled. “That’s something I can grasp, anyway. It supports Mary’s weird notion about changing the past. That stillness out there. Time stasis. To be conscious is to be conscious ofchange . . . now I talk in tongues, Mary.”

  “It’s only a word game, Hank. Keep talking.”

  “All right, changing the past, words only,” Vane said. “Coercing history by leaving someone behind. That dream I had out there, damn it, I wanted to tell Mary to go to hell and I couldn’t. Maybe that was history coercing me. But let’s all go out now, and if I hit that sequence again you can damn well bet I’ll refuse and we’ll be out of this fix. Word game!”