New Writings in SF 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  “Phew! I begin to see the attraction.”

  “Precisely,” said Porter. “If we can’t reach the stars via Tau-space then it’s doubtful if we shall ever reach them. But standing in our way is a set of problems so imponderable that we don’t know how to begin to start to solve them.”

  “How much do we know about these problems?”

  “Lamentably little. Apart from the monstrosities in the vaults which came back on automatic-recall vectors, all our information is limited to transmitted verbal and telemetered material gathered during the first few hours of a probe vector run—that is to say, before the vessels achieved the speed of light.”

  “So the speed of light is a limiting velocity?”

  “Not in the usual sense. Neither is it a failure of communication due to Döppler effect. This is something truly frightening in its implications.”

  “Go on!” Brevis said, noting the look in Porter’s eyes.

  “When the probe vessel reaches the velocity of light our receiver here at Tau Research breaks down. The probe continues to transmit, but we can’t receive its signals.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Brevis.

  “Neither do we.” Porter’s face was haunted. “Their signal strength increases to such proportions that the current actually fuses the terminal elements of our receiver. Millions of amperes are involved.”

  “But how can that be?”

  “I don’t know. But the implications are terrifying. If we can receive such power over such a distance . . . then what must have happened to the ship itself? Such a condition presupposes that the ship’s transmitters are happily modulating beamed power equal to the output of a pretty fair-sized star.”

  TWO

  “Well, that’s the ship, Eric. We’re calling her Lambda II after Rorsch’s original Tau raft.”

  Brevis looked down. “And there the similarity ends,” he said.

  They were on the balcony of Tau Research’s main assembly shop, and below them the huge vessel, running almost the length of the facility, returned the solid glint of flawlessly polished metal. Even now a group of fitters was engaged in burnishing the plating with great attention, against the possibility of its eventual emergence into the rays of some strange and alien sun.

  “It looks more like a spaceship than a Tau craft,” said Brevis.

  “That’s effectively what it is—a spaceship built around the largest and most stable Tau-spin generator we could find. We’ve made it capable of operating in either Tau or real space environments in the hope that we may achieve the easy transposition from one to the other. We’ve proved such a transposition is possible in vacuum without the necessity for a grid.”

  “I’d no idea you were planning anything on this scale.”

  Porter shrugged. “It’s our last chance, Paul. Tau Corporation is staking everything on this gamble. We’ve spent twenty-one and a half million on Lambda II so far—and it could have been five times that much except that the Nuclear Energy Authority donated the reactor design and provided the fuel. The Rorsch generator was diverted from a luxury Tau liner already under construction, or we could easily have spent another three million on that.”

  Bevis looked slightly dazed. “And this type of money is readily available?”

  “A hundred times that, if necessary. The project is that important. The proof of the project is whether we can go out into deep-Tau and come back alive. Any facility which might aid us in doing just that is ours for the asking.”

  Brevis nodded. “If only we knew in advance what to ask for,” he said.

  Immediately below them now the four snow-white ceramic tubes of the thrust jets gave a shrewd hint of the capacity of the drive reactor, cunningly contrived to conform to the hindshape of the hull itself. Many large industrial cities had less power than this at their disposal. Almost centrally along its length the hull bulged into a globe wherein was situated the mammoth Rorsch generator, originally designed to induce Tau-spin in a luxury craft of nearly a hundred times the mass displacement of its present charge.

  The front of the ship was blind, save for antennae and the scanning and sensing devices feeding the instrumentation which had to serve in lieu of eyes. The only concession to the need to physically observe was the blister atop the ship, which emerged through the heavy shielding protecting the ship’s occupants from the unwelcome psychic molestations of the raw Tau environment. Apart from that, the hull was featureless.

  “We’ll go in later,” said Porter. “First I want you to meet the rest of the team. I know they’re very curious about you.”

  “Curious?”

  Porter smiled briefly. “I could have been forgiven for picking a cosmologist, a nuclear physicist, or a radio-astronomer—in fact a man specializing in any of the hundred or so branches of physical science with which we get involved in deep-Tau work. But when I announced I was bringing in a far-out psychologist, reactions ranged from the incredulous to the hostile.

  “The objections weren’t too serious, of course. We needed a qualified medic aboard, and that factor plus your previous record in Tau made you the natural choice anyway. But Tau pilots especially are somewhat sensitive of implied criticism of their mental balance. Not unreasonably, I suppose, when we expect them to come to meaningful decisions in what is essentially an irrational environment.”

  “I promise you I’ll tread lightly,” said Brevis.

  The others were already in the office when they arrived. Porter kept the introductions brief. Sigmund Grus, fortyish, a Tau Research senior physicist, heavy, Germanic save in all but accent. He was every inch an applied intellectual, with a rational solidity behind his thinking which matched his frame.

  The second was Pat Driscoll, senior Tau test pilot. An altogether different character. In his early thirties, he was nervous and apparently unsure of himself. Though his face registered his thoughts on the trend of the conversation, he only once allowed himself to speak, and then did so with such embarrassing over-emphasis of point that he confused himself in mid-sentence and trailed back into pathetic silence.

  After two hours the meeting broke up, they having summarized for Brevis’ benefit the duties and responsibilities of each man on the team. Brevis alone had no set duties. While the others concerned themselves with the machines and mechanics of the trip, his concern was solely with the functioning of the men.

  Afterwards Brevis and Porter went down to the ship. The psychologist had to familiarize himself with the various equipments controlling the temperature, humidity and composition of the ship’s atmosphere, and the devices provided to assist survival against various levels of potential catastrophe. Also it was left to him to equip the tiny hospital room and operating theatre, and to decide what medicaments and drugs should be carried. Porter showed him his quarters and provided him with the necessary charts and layouts.

  “By the way, Eric, what do you make of the others?” Porter slipped the question in apparently casually as they turned to leave, but there was no doubt it had been long in his mind.

  Brevis shrugged. “I was going to take that up with you. I take it they were picked for their specialities rather than their suitability for an exploratory voyage of this kind.”

  “Very much so. We don’t have any mental and physical supermen with sufficiently advanced Tau knowledge, and it would take too long to train some. Therefore we compromised. We took the most technically able men who also had practical Tau operating experience, and threw in a full-time psychologist to balance the equation. Unorthodox, I know, but it’s only one of the compromises we’ve had to make in getting a project like this off the ground.”

  “Mm!” said Brevis. “Ordinarily the only man I’d recommend for a venture of this magnitude would be yourself. Sigmund Grus is sound enough, but he’d be better left in his own laboratory with his wife to meet him in the car. But I’m more than a little dubious about Pat Driscoll. He’s a man who lives inside himself too much. I’d imagine his I.Q. is something quite fantastic, but he
’s introverted almost to the point of being unable to communicate. I certainly can’t recommend exposing him to stressful situations. He’s a weak link, Paul.”

  “But he’s also the best and most experienced Tau pilot available. He has over a thousand vector runs to his credit, many of them on unprogrammed exploratory runs. Take it from me, Eric, there’s no pilot on Tau Corporation’s payroll better suited than Pat Driscoll to handle this trip.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But at least you can’t say you weren’t warned.”

  “Exactly what are you afraid of, Eric? Every man on this team has already proven his capability of working and surviving under extreme Tau conditions. You can’t have a better criterion than that.”

  “No, except that I suspect both you and I are already quite certain that the extremes of the Tau-state influence aren’t going to be our greatest hazards. Else, Paul, why did you include as your medic someone who was also a far-out psychologist?”

  In the subsequent months of preparation the tension slowly mounted. Brevis had ample time to observe its effect upon his fellow team members. He found nothing to make him revise his original conclusions as to their psychological suitability, but he rapidly acquired a respect for their technical competence. Sigmund Grus, particularly, impressed him with his detailed understanding of the craft and all its installations.

  Two major landmarks measured the progress towards the final departure time. The first was the bringing of the Lambda II’s reactor up to criticality, and the second was the successful proving trial of the giant Rorsch Tau-spin generator. Then the only stage left was the towing of the craft from the assembly shop to the adjoining bay where lay the immense Tau terminal grid which would launch its charge into the unknowns of the deep-Tau continuum.

  When this operation too had been completed, the air of expectancy and tension rose like a fever. Whether for success or disaster, the die was already cast. Any inherent faults and shortcomings in the ship were both unknown and scarcely alterable. This was the machine, the physics and mechanics of the project. From this point on the emphasis was very much on the men.

  In the eighteen hours of countdown every conceivable item of instrumentation, control and communication was re-checked, and double checked. The huge Rorsch generator, unstable in standby state, responded magnificently on ready-state power, and gave every promise of a fault-free operating condition. The reactor performance was well above specification, and the ship computer had long been soundlessly exchanging its fantastic number sequences with its communication counterpart in the Tau Research information centre.

  At two hours to take-off, the team had their final assembly. The atmosphere was so highly charged emotionally that the image of the voyage had assumed epic proportions before it had even begun, and Brevis signalled to Porter to close the hatches early to quieten the tension. Their departure into such a radical unknown as deep-Tau was a psychological vortex which those who experienced it would never quite forget.

  With the hatches closed and the occupants insulated from the outer activities except for the electronic chatter of check and counter-check, the tension within the ship swiftly subsided. It was replaced by an immediate sense of identity with the ship and its purpose. Porter took the control room, Driscoll the blister. Grus, having re-run a check-out exercise on the reactor, hastened to his beloved computer where the instrument data was being processed into an endless electronic digest which could be all the world outside might ever know as to their fate in deep-Tau.

  Brevis, his instrumentational chores completed, found himself suddenly at a loss, and retired to his bunk to lay, half resting, mentally reviewing what he knew of the strengths and weaknesses of his companions, and listening to their conversation on the intercom set.

  “Zero minus ten minutes.” Porter’s voice over the loudspeaker was a clear, precise, ritualistic chant. Perfectly controlled. No sign yet that his subconscious had fully absorbed the impact of the situation.

  “Tracking stations Pi and Sigma receiving our beam and locked on,” said Grus. Sigmund Grus—his strength was that he probably never would perceive the deeper significance of the situation. As the flesh served to cushion his body, so his technology cushioned his mind. But pity him on the day when some inexorable reality leaned down to crush him.

  “Seventeen point nine times ten to the minus eleven. Sigmund, I’ll need help with the tensor analysis.” That was Driscoll. His psyche knew where they were going . . . had known it for a long time . . . had soaked itself in a little acid-pit of dread. But when your psyche has a wound in it as deep and raw as his, you can’t bear to be far away from the possibility of death for long. Nevertheless you can still leave sweat, grey upon the pillow.

  And himself? How much of the unknown could he take? No use to worry. The unknown and the irrational was his speciality. His drugs had taken him through stranger exercises of the mind than anything deep-Tau might have to offer. Perhaps.

  “Three minutes,” said Porter’s voice. “This will be a two-part take-off. We will adopt the Tau state but remain on the grid until the computer has cleared the course co-ordinates. Eric, if you want to do any preliminary work on the Tau phenomena you’d better join Pat in the blister right away.”

  Brevis leaned to his microphone. “Check!”

  He made his way to the blister directly. Somewhere down the corridors as he walked, the ship made a perfect transition from real space into Tau, becoming coexistent with the molecules of the air which rushed in to fill the void it had left on the grid. But deep within the ship the transition was indetectable. In the blister, beyond the screens, it would be different. Very different. He halted before the heavy blister door and wiped the sweat from his palms. The reaction of unshielded Tau influence with certain centres of the brain gave rise to hallucinatory images so strong that they equated fairly well with all a man could ever know of reality.

  He shouldered the door open, watching the telltales on the wall to give him an indication of the position of the screens set mazeform to shield the emanations of the blister from the ship. The room was dark, but three steps sufficed to place him in the maze and from there he could proceed by fingertip location of the route. But as his head cleared the final screen he again stopped, breathing heavily with part fear and part wonder.

  Although their spatial analogue was still the black iron of the grid in the confines of Tau Research, nothing of this was visible. Instead, the blister seemed to be an island floating in alarming isolation in the midst of a pink waste which was the characteristic image of the Tau Gamma mode of resonance. But the knowledge of its origin in no way lessened its scope and awesomeness. Here was space, limitless in a way no real-space panorama could ever be.

  Nothing was visible above or below, nor on any side, save for a shifting pink radiance which had no apparent source and which closed around from all sides. Brevis knew this to be subjective illusion, and that even if he closed his eyes the impression would remain. But he could not rid himself of the vertigo or the feeling of profound insignificance which the scene impressed upon his mind.

  Driscoll’s familiarity, however, had made him more immune. He was already at work under the blister’s dome with refractometer, spectrum analyser, polariscope and sighting apparatus, relaying vector and tensor co-ordinates to Grus to form the basis for the calculation of the course. Brevis was fascinated. Driscoll was setting up line, angle and point relationships by purely visual reference to the Tau-domain image beyond the blister, fixing point co-ordinates to seven decimal places as though they were physical absolutes. But how the information was determined, or how it could be established with such accuracy from the Tau image, he was unable to decide. In this he sensed the reason for Driscoll’s inclusion in the team. The ability to interpret the Tau image in terms of mathematically usable quanta was indeed a facility worthy of respect.

  Brevis had no idea at all how it was achieved. If any features were visible at all, they were vague features of contrasted intensity in the
illuminated field, like some cosmological X-ray diffraction pattern, which Driscoll could read with expert eyes and from which he established his axes and points, as though drawing an elaborate imaginary three-dimensional spider-web across the pink backdrop of unreality.

  Finally Sigmund Grus was satisfied.

  “That’s all we need for now, Pat. Computation time is about seven minutes. Paul, I can give you a deadline in ten minutes.”

  “Right.” Porter’s voice cut in on the communicator. “Primary acceleration will exert an apparent force of a half gravity in a direction parallel to the long axis of the ship. This is not a measure of the acceleration rate but a gravitic nuclear reluctance effect which will dissipate rapidly as the ship leaves the Earth’s magnetic field. Eric, you won’t have experienced this yet, but just brace yourself against a stern bulkhead until it passes. Sigmund, I’m handing control to the computer. As soon as the course is taped you can give her the gun.”