New Writings in SF 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  THREE

  Bred in a world used to the statistics of the crushing acceleration gravities of rocket spaceflight, Brevis had earlier envisioned their leap towards light-speed velocities would be a prolonged spell of suffering in an acceleration couch. But in the modified physics of the Tau domain their actual departure was a physical anticlimax. The half gravity Porter had promised proved no more than a gentle push against the wall, a force against which he could move and lean quite easily. The effect was as if the room had rotated slightly on its axis so that the wall on which he leaned inclined back at an angle and the floor sloped upwards. After a few minutes both wall and floor returned to the normal.

  When conditions had stabilized and the Tau image remained unchanged, Brevis left the blister and went to the control room where the activity was now centred. So effortless had been the moment of departure that he was inwardly slightly sceptical that they had already achieved a velocity greater than a conventional rocket could ever hope to match. It was also incredible that they could have developed a rate of acceleration beyond the structural endurance of any known material operating in a real-space environment.

  Even in the control room the air of unreality grew no less. The T-Döppler radar and similar devices meant things to Porter and the computer but to Brevis’ untrained eye gave no more sensible indication of speed now than they had when the ship was at rest. As their speed climbed to measurable fractions of that of light Brevis was completely at a loss to convince himself of any condition other than that of being completely at rest. He finally dismissed the problem and turned his attention to his own charges—the human components of the ship.

  And it was here he discovered, at least in Grus and Porter, that the sense of speed and the fear of it was very much in evidence. What Driscoll thought he absorbed into himself, but the tension rising in the other two was a minute by minute tightening of a spring. Real-space physics postulated the speed of light to be a physical absolute, which nothing could transcend. But in less than four hours they and their ship were going to challenge that barrier at a velocity nearing three hundred thousand kilometres a second. Then something was going to have to give—ship and men, or physical absolute, and nothing in their experience could guide them as to what might follow. Brevis reflected curiously that while both men had dared to penetrate so far into the field of Tau physics they still had an inbred fear of transgressing the absolute of light speed.

  Occasionally he returned to the blister, but the Tau Gamma image held steady and inscrutable save to Driscoll’s eyes as he occasionally took reference readings from the pink transience to verify the computed course. The psychologist noted that the image was growing in intensity, and hardening in such a way that on entering the blister the image would snap into view rather than simply become apparent as a visual image would. Also its influence extended farther into the screen maze.

  The strength of the hallucination was now beginning to overpower the visual, so that the blister layout and Driscoll’s instruments were all assuming an apparent transparency through which diffused the pinkness of the surrounding image. Even Driscoll and himself were becoming translucent and losing definition under the influence of the Tau emanation. And, while the others were inwardly fearing the approach to the light barrier, Driscoll’s fear was more apparent in the blister, where the shaping and intensification of the image was a tangible portent of the unknown into which they were headed.

  “I don’t like this at all, Paul,” said Driscoll at last. “Signs are that this image is growing unstable as our velocity increases. I don’t know what it will break into, but it won’t be a simple mode jump.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “At this intensity the image is tolerable at the moment because it’s unchanging. But if it breaks to a living pattern it could become a nightmare in here. And if it breaks fast we might not even make it to the door.”

  “How so?”

  “It can flay the senses out of you in seconds if you catch a rogue run of images. And since it can enter and confuse the brain even when you’re unconscious, it can interfere even with the autonomic nervous system. Then it becomes a killer. I’d say it was a killer Tau storm that’s brewing now.”

  “Then let’s get out,” Brevis said.

  “You go. I’ve got to take a few more readings while I can still see the instruments.”

  “Then do me a favour,” Brevis said. “Leave the communicator open and report not less than once a minute. Miss a minute and I’ll be back here to get you out.”

  “Thanks, Eric. I’ll do that. You’ve just five minutes if you want to be in the control room when we hit the light barrier. I think this image will split wide about then, and it may be preferable if one of us is elsewhere than in the blister when that happens.”

  A simple indication. Two blips on the face of an oscilloscope, crawling inexorably together. One blip indicating the speed of light, the other giving ship speed. The space intervening represented the amount by which the ship velocity lagged behind that of light. A narrowing difference. An approaching unknown.

  Two blips crawling together. Now two centimetres apart, now one, with the basic tenets of real-space physics stacked high against the odds of their meeting, and the ingenuity of man pushing fearfully in favour of their passing.

  The sweat stood broad on Porter’s brow. Grus’ fingers deftly laid mathematical expressions on the keyboard of a computer input. He too was near to breaking under the strain, but syphoned his nervous energy constantly into symbolic equations representing the event. The separation between the blips closed to a few millimetres, then to a hairsbreadth spacing which seemed to endure for an eternity. Then, just as it seemed that the absolute velocity of light was going to remain inviolate, the blips passed one another. And concurrently the men experienced an indefinable shiver which ran throughout their bodies as if every cell had undergone some transition yet still emerged whole and undamaged.

  Porter rapidly checked his instruments and confirmed that they had indeed passed the light barrier, and that their rate of acceleration was still increasing. The detectors told of a million kilometre light flare they had wakened in the emptiness of space, but this evidence, was purely metered information, and inside the ship human senses were still totally unable to appreciate the fantastic velocity of their passage.

  But Brevis had anticipated the sudden cessation of Driscoll’s voice over the intercom. Without pausing to share with the others the relief and triumph of the moment he rushed back through the corridors to the blister. As he passed through the screens he was aware, even before he could see it, that the image had broken. The kaleidoscope of lights that hit him as he reached the end of the maze shocked his senses, and he would have lost orientation had not his shoulder still been in contact with the lead slab of the screen.

  Driscoll was immediately in front of the entrance, invisible now against the strength of the hallucination, but presumably standing fascinated by the living diorama of the now overwhelming Tau image. When Brevis grasped his arm he woke as though from sleep, and allowed himself to be led through the maze like a blind man. Outside, Brevis inspected him closely.

  “Are you all right? How do you feel?”

  Driscoll bit his lip and smiled wanly. “As well as can be expected. I guess I stayed a little longer than I should.” His face was deathly white.

  Brevis nodded. “That’s a fair summary. I want you to go to your cabin, Pat, and rest for a while. I’ll give you a sedative that’ll put you to sleep for a few hours. And I don’t want you to go back into the blister again until you’ve checked with me. I knew a rogue Tau image was vicious, but I’d not expected it to have that sort of effect in so short a time.”

  Driscoll’s eyes searched the psychologist’s face, and he seemed about to say something when a sudden wave of nausea and dizziness caused him to sway and clutch at his head. Thereafter he leaned heavily on Brevis’ arm all the way to the cabin.

  Though the light barrier had been passe
d, the tensions were still very much in evidence. They were now facing the great unknowns, a tiny, impudent, splint of metal and humanity fleeting at super-light speed across the analogue of interstellar space. The probes had previously achieved this condition also—but the few that had ever returned now formed a mind-twisting collection of physical paradoxes in the grim museum vaults of Tau Research. But there were no answers yet as to what had happened to the probes or why.

  Men and computer constantly scanned every available bit and digit of instrumental data, searching for some clue to the mystery. But both mechanisms and men failed to identify anything amiss with the project. All known functions were staying well within their designated parameters, and thirty times a second the computer completed its checks and returned a negative comment. Grus let the printout tape slip by him unnoticed. Its detail was irrelevant. Although the computer was satisfied, none of the men could confess to being free from the nagging apprehension that they had already penetrated past the point of no return. But whatever the factor which had been added or taken away, it was neither recordable nor encompassed by their systems of detection.

  Drawn by a certain fascination, Brevis returned once to the blister maze and cautiously sampled the now rampant image. It blazed in his head and formed such frightening confusion that he was forced to retire without gleaning anything of value from the experiment. As he was returning to the control room he found Sigmund Grus bending close to the floor in the corridor, examining something. He moved to pass, but the physicist motioned him back.

  “Careful, Eric! There is something here I don’t understand. See there—a tiny light shining.”

  Without Sigmund’s direction Brevis would not have noticed the phenomenon for himself, so minute and intangible did it appear. But following the line of the indicating finger he found the object, and paused in wonder. In the corridor, unsupported and apparently unaffected by the airstream from the ventilators, drifted a minute splint of light, like a luminous dust mote. It took him several seconds to realize that the object was in fact incredibly small and that it was visible mainly by virtue of its extreme brilliance. It was difficult to imagine how such a degree of radiation could be sustained by anything so lacking in size.

  “What is it?” Brevis asked at last.

  “It could be a projection of something from real-space into Tau—a sort of breakthrough of atomic condition.”

  “I thought that was impossible.”

  “It’s barely possible, even in theory. Projection requires an extreme degree of excitation on the part of the basic atom—a very extreme degree, I can assure you.”

  “How extreme?’

  “The excitation state involved in nuclear fusion, at least.” Grus appeared thoughtful. “But something tells me this isn’t a simple projection. This is something new. Such a thing should never exist, even as a projection. You couldn’t have a self-sustaining fusion reaction that small.”

  He produced a pencil and probed the splint carefully. It did not move, but seemed rather to penetrate the pencil and emerge unchanged. He examined the pencil in silence.

  “I don’t like this at all,” he said finally, holding the pencil up to the light. “Would you fetch Paul?”

  Porter came without comment. The top-line frown reflected the fear which was already clawing deep in his guts, and the new phenomenon could add no more or less to the burden of responsibility he was already carrying. Brevis watched him carefully for signs of hysteria, and was relieved to find none.

  When they reached the corridor Sigmund had extinguished the overhead fluorescent panels, and was observing his discovery against the background under the dim illumination of the tritium safety lamps. In this setting the splint burned inconceivably bright for its size, casting a clear glow on the bulkhead.

  “Don’t touch it,” Grus warned. “It could be dangerous. I want to try a test.”

  He went off to the laboratory and returned with a square of fine tungsten foil. He passed this several times through the point of light. It remained unmoving. Then he ran to the optical room and closed the door. A minute later he was back.

  “Holes right through,” he said. “I don’t think this can be a projection. Its heat is incredible but the holes it makes are so minute that they’re hardly capable of being resolved with our microscope. Nothing that small should possess that sort of energy. Paul, I want to do a spectrum analysis on this thing.”

  “I’ll help you,” Porter said. “But we’ll have to dismount the spectrograph and fetch it out here since we can’t pick that thing up.”

  “Can I assist?” Brevis asked.

  “Not much at the moment, Eric. We’ve some delicate work ahead of us, and its specialized. We’ll let you know our findings when we’re through.”

  Brevis nodded and returned to his cabin. He had the curious impression that both men already suspected and feared what their findings would be. He checked through his stocks of tranquillizers in the store-cupboard and wondered just how long such mental and intellectual strain could be offset by purely chemical means. At some point a psyche was going to refuse to be pacified by drugs, and when that point came somebody was going to snap. Driscoll was already showing signs of breaking up. And who next?

  It was about an hour later that Porter knocked on his door.

  “May we come in?”

  “Do.” Brevis pulled down the other bunk to form a seat and beckoned him in. Grus followed, still studying the long strips of photographic paper from his instrument. His hands were trembling.

  “We’ve found what it was, Eric.” Even at that point Porter was reluctant to put a name to his fear.

  “I think I already know,” said Brevis quietly. “It’s a star.”

  “You knew?”

  “I guessed about the same time that you did. But I was expecting it. You weren’t.”

  “But a star . . .” said Porter, and his voice was ragged. “It’s a spectral G-type sun, similar to Sol. It could measure perhaps a million miles across. And it’s out there in the corridor like a point of light so small you can hardly measure the holes it makes. Christ, Eric, if that’s a sun out there—what size does that make us?”

  FOUR

  Putting his empty glass unsteadily back on the table, Porter pushed the hair from his face.

  “I still don’t see how you could have anticipated this, Eric.”

  “Not exactly this, but I was prepared for something of this nature. I saw the Tau probe vessel which came back only twenty-two inches long. This is part of the same pattern. Somehow, Paul, entry into deep-Tau cuts things adrift not only from the universe but from the controlling physical constants of the universe. I’ve no idea how long the ship is now, but if you want to try the calculation, start by using light-years instead of metres.”

  “And yet you aren’t frightened silly at the prospect?”

  Brevis refilled the glasses from the bottle on the table.

  “No. So far the survival threats here are purely intellectual ones. It would take a well-trained mind to appreciate that we three, sitting here drinking whisky, regard ourselves as being close to death. And if asked what form of death, we none of us could even define it.”

  Porter watched his face carefully for a moment. “You’re dead right of course. We’ve come unstuck from the universe, certainly, but so far it’s panic not physics which is most likely to kill us. Sigmund, have you enough data to calculate our size from the dimensions of that star, assuming it’s a regular G-type dwarf?”

  “I’ll work on it,” said Grus. “But there’s a more urgent problem first. That star must have entered through the hull, and therefore left a puncture. I think our first concern must be the preservation of our atmosphere.”

  “If the holes it made in the hull are no greater than those it made in the foil, the air losses won’t be measurable.”

  “True. But that’s only a simple G-dwarf. What happens if we run up against a giant like Betelgeuse? That would make a hole we couldn’t afford to i
gnore. I suggest we try to navigate in a direction away from the island universes until we’ve some idea of what we’re up against.”

  “Good point,” said Porter. “I’m going up to the control room to see if we can get sufficient information from the instruments to give us a bearing on a relatively unpopulated region of space. I could use Pat’s help, Eric. Is he still sleeping?”

  Brevis glanced at his watch. “I gave him a sedative about four hous ago. He should be out of it by now. I’ll go and wake him.”

  “Get him to join me in Control. We’ve got instrumentation for detecting stellar objects in real space, but whether it can detect star systems the size of meteorites projecting into Tau is a rather different problem. Is it possible to use the blister?”

  Brevis shook his head. “That’s completely out of the question. The Tau-psychic interaction in there is so strong it would drive a man senseless in fifteen minutes, and kill him in thirty.”