New Writings in SF 8 - [Anthology] Read online

  Porter nodded his acceptance of the fact and went out of the door. Brevis’ own intention of following was delayed by a sudden gesture from Grus towards the end of the room. Through the wall of the cabin another star had drifted, and they both paused in fascination as the tiny splint of light cleared the mirror of the table top by a centimetre and neared the whisky bottle standing in its path. Brevis moved to take the bottle out of the way, but Grus stopped him.

  “Wait, Eric. There’s something we need to know.”

  The splint touched the bottle and penetrated slightly into the glass. Then with a crash the bottle shattered, scattering liquor and glass on to the table and the floor. The star, apparently unaffected, continued its slow, amazing journey across the room.

  “Bad!” said Grus. “We none of us dare sleep with those things drifting through. At best they could be painful, at worst, lethal. Can you imagine waking with one of those entering your temple? Even walking into one could cause a pretty nasty injury.” He glanced around him. “And it’s only a matter of time before one of them cuts some wiring or hits something vital. And . . . Oh my God!”

  Brevis was caught by his sudden spasm of alarm.

  “My God!” said Grus again. “I’ve been worrying about the heat and visible spectra, but those things must be chucking out hard radiation as well. Not only could they be a fair biological hazard, but if one of them gets into the computer it’ll flip every solid-state device in the whole assembly. The whole control system will go haywire, to say nothing of the loss of the computer function. You’d best get Pat up to Control fast. I’ll try and get a radiation check on this one, but unless I miss my guess we’ve a death threat far more tangible than panic already with us.”

  Brevis tried to raise Driscoll on the intercom, but failed. Carefully avoiding the star in the corridor he ran to Driscoll’s cabin. It was empty. The sheets on the bed were still warm, but not too recently occupied. Swiftly he checked the few other likely places. They were similarly bare. Then he flipped the emergency communication button.

  “Paul! Sigmund! Is Pat with you somewhere?”

  “Not here,” said Grus.

  “Nor in Control.” Porter’s voice carried a note of alarm. “What’s the matter, Eric?”

  “I’ve an idea the damn idiot’s gone back into the blister. The image there is so ultra-real it’s almost addictive. I’ve noticed a similar tendency in myself. Once you’ve experienced it you can’t let it alone.”

  “Damn!” said Porter. “Have you tried him on the intercom?”

  “He must be hearing my voice now,” said Brevis, “but if he’s in the blister he won’t respond because the Tau image will represent the dominant reality. Pat, for God’s sake, if you can hear me, answer!”

  The set returned only silence and little electronic sounds gathered from various parts of the ship.

  “Then he’ll have to stay there until the course is re-set,” said Porter.

  “No. He could have been there ten or fifteen minutes already. Leave him exposed for as long again and we won’t need to fetch him out. Just paint R.I.P. on the blister door and pack his effects for his relatives. That’s a killer image in there. I’m going to try and help him.”

  Without waiting for Porter to reply, Brevis ran directly to the blister door. It was slightly open, though he knew it to have been closed the last time he had left. The telltales on the wall indicated that the screen maze inside had been altered or damaged. This in itself was sufficient to show that Driscoll had entered and therefore needed help.

  Before he could enter, Grus arrived. Porter was close behind. Porter summed up the situation with a quick glance, and turned to Brevis.

  “I can’t let you go in there, Eric. Pat’ll have to take what’s coming to him. I daren’t risk losing you too.”

  “And we daren’t risk losing Pat—not if we ever want to find our way home again. He may be unconscious, but I doubt if he’s dead yet. There’s still a chance of getting him out alive. Later there won’t be.”

  Porter came to a sudden decision. “Very well. But you go in with a rope around your waist. You’ll have five minutes, and then we’ll haul you out if necessary. And try not to fall down among the screens or you might get hurt on the way out.”

  “If you insist.” Brevis stood submissively while Grus fetched a rope from the store-room and fastened it round his waist. Porter caught him by the shoulder.

  “Five minutes, Eric—and good luck!”

  Brevis shouldered open the heavy door and entered. It was quite dark inside, and, as the telltales had indicated, the internal screens were disarranged. All he could see initially was a fuzz of diffused polychromatic light which crept around the disordered lines of the lead panels. Seeking orientation, he moved back to the wall and sought the light switch.

  As his fingers moved the toggle he was engulfed by a wave of vibrant, dancing, idiotic, multi-coloured patterns, which swarmed in front of him like a living kaleidoscope. The imagery trapped his senses in a mesmeric focus which almost robbed him of his power to react. Mercifully the toggle remained under his fingers and he snapped it off urgently, thankfully relaxing in the return of darkness.

  “Are you all right, Eric?” Porter’s voice sounded a hundred times farther than it should.

  “Just about,” said Brevis. “Deep-Tau emanation and A.C. lighting make a formidable combination. I couldn’t stand that for long. I’ll do the rest blind.”

  Slowly he found the screens and devised a path between them and across those which had fallen, scowling at the thought of the psychic paroxysm which had driven Driscoll to attack the heavy screening with such irrational violence. The edges of the lead sheets appeared fuzzed and burred with a polychrome haze which grew stronger as he entered through the maze and hinted at the violence and turbulence of the Tau-psychic effects rampant in the blister proper.

  He searched each area urgently with his hands, hoping that Driscoll had fallen between the screens and away from the awful aura ahead. But he knew in his heart that this would not be so, and he felt a wave of fear at the prospect of having to penetrate finally into the unshielded extravagances of the raw Tau influence.

  When he turned the last corner into the blister the wave of imagery and sensation tore down at him apparently from all sides, swamping his senses and leaving only the single core of his objective mind to guide him in his purpose.

  Dazed by light and form and colour, his eyes attempted to follow and analyse the geometrically untenable planes and images as he trod apparently through a macrocosm of chaos which only his iron resolution reminded him was the blister floor. His mind seized on the shattering images and attempted to rationalize them into meaningful terms and comprehend the semantic substance with which every line of light was seeded. Every now and again his imagination became caught in a snare of some intriguing speculation, and he had to wrench his mind free with almost physical effort, knowing the deadly penalty for indulgence.

  He could understand now the fatal attraction of the Tau images for Driscoll. The brain received the images direct, without the filtration and attenuation of the normal human senses. The mind was released from the mundane bonds of limited sensory experience, and could swing, undamped, in domains of previously unfathomable concepts, without the distractions and reflexes of the body.

  A savage jerk under the ribs brought his own wandering thoughts back to focus on his mission. He stumbled over Driscoll’s body on the floor, but fortunately did not fall. He could see nothing of the form he caught up to his shoulders, only the variegated colours of the quasi infinities which clawed at his mind with snags of intangible steel.

  Again the rope caught at his chest, this time insistently. He hesitated, having no means of gaining his bearings in the unchartable fantasies in which he was immersed. The rope had now become the sole link with another sort of reality, an invisible umbilical cord connecting him across the unknown to an isolated, dark womb of fear and apprehension which was the ship and its situation. He
felt an irrational desire to slip the knot and not to return to the worry-shrouded oppression of shades with its precarious chance of re-birth.

  The third pull of the rope was decisive. Before he could re-arrange his burden so as to get his fingers to the knot he was dragged forcibly against the screens and through them, until, near the end of the ruined maze, darkness closed down again and the mental turbulence grew quiet. Hands seized him in the darkness and slipped the body from his back, then thrust him outward into a different kind of light—the cold, fluorescent harshness of reality. He fell into the corridor and remained there for many seconds, shaking the images from out of his head, until Porter came and helped him to his feet.

  “How do you feel, Eric?”

  “Grim. But I think it will pass.” He looked up and saw the door of the blister still part open. “But it’s not a risk I’d care to take again. Can you fix that hatch permanently closed?”

  “I’ll weld it shut,” promised Porter. He looked at Driscoll, now laid desperately unconscious in the gangway. “Not that it looks as if he’ll be interested in it for a while.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of him,” said Brevis. “I was thinking of myself.”

  Outwardly, Porter’s evasive manoeuvre seemed to be a success. His instrumental questing finally located a direction in space where the stellar population was obviously less. Breaking the pre-set course co-ordinates, he manually directed the ship in this direction. Miraculously both astral bodies which had entered the hull drifted slowly out through the fabric again without detectable damage to the vessel. Then they waited. No further cosmic intruders penetrated into the ship, and finally they relaxed.

  This gave them the respite needed to consider their plight more logically. But internal tensions were creeping dangerously high. Brevis was more than anxious about the continuing stress and its inhibiting effect on the type of intellectual free-wheeling which the problem demanded.

  Grus was tending to concentrate his energies on routine tasks, as though trying to convince himself that he did not have time enough to grapple with the major problem. Driscoll was being maintained in a state of light sedation after his experiences in the blister, and was therefore intellectually inactive. Even Porter was having difficulty in bringing his mind to a position of logical attack.

  “The hell of it is,” said Porter, “you can’t even find a point from which to start solving a problem like this.”

  “You’re not thinking too clearly, Paul,” said Brevis. “You’re allowing yourself to be fazed by the size of the concepts instead of looking for fundamentals. I’m no physicist, but the problem appears to me to be one of congruency. We’ve lost physical congruence with our own universe. We’re no longer controlled by whatever factors control the size of things. Now, what factors do control the size of things, Paul? Why is anything the size it is, rather than a million times larger or smaller?”

  “A good question,” said Porter, “and way outside my field. I don’t pretend to know the answer. The size of a thing is always relative. I suppose the nearest thing to absolute units are the sizes of the atoms and molecules from which matter is constructed. Aggregates of matter generate and are acted upon by certain forces—molecular binding forces, gravitation, centrifugal forces and the like, which roughly determine the mass-range which that type of object normally achieves.

  “It’s the interaction of possible states of matter, and the forces generated by them and acting upon them, which appears to control the size of everything in the universe. You can’t have a molecule as large as a star or a star as small as a molecule because either would be unstable.”

  “Then what happened to place us outside this control?”

  “I don’t know. We were in a state of Tau-spin resonance when we accelerated through the speed of light. It’s beginning to look as though the Einsteinian mass-velocity relationship does apply in Tau, but in a peculiar way. Instead of the velocity being limited to that of light, we passed easily through the light barrier, but tore our own atoms free from the controlling influence of the universe instead. Effectively we’re a universe in our own right now—still self-integrated, but unconnected with any other universe. And Heaven alone knows what factor is controlling our absolute size relative to the universe from which we started.”

  “Are we still in Tau-space?”

  “The Rorsch generator is still running, but our molecular density is so low relative to the star stuff through which we’re passing that it’s doubtful if a true Tau state is being maintained.”

  “Can’t we just reverse the process and drop back through the light barrier?”

  “We’re trying,” said Porter, “but there’s no indication yet that it’s going to work. Since we cleared the star patch we’ve been winding down our speed—eighteen hours, and we still aren’t much above light velocity now. So far our size has done nothing but increase slightly more. I’d guess that once our atoms were torn from the universe they found some arbitrary relationship of their own which is independent of velocity.”

  “That’s a key factor,” said Brevis. “This arbitrary relationship—I’m not convinced it’s true. I suspect there’s still some relationship between our present size and the size we were when we started. I think there must be some connecting link. Can we check this at all?”

  “We can fling all our co-ordinates into the computer and see if we can spot a relationship. If there is a controlling principle it should show up as a function of something.”

  “Will you do that?” said Brevis. “If you can isolate the controlling factor it gives us a possible method of attack on the problem by attempting to reverse the issue.”

  “I’ll get Sigmund on it right away. If we spot anything I’ll let you know immediately.”

  FIVE

  In this, Brevis had at least achieved his object of getting Porter to apply himself to the task. Once a line of investigation had been initiated Porter could be relied upon to follow it to its logical conclusion. Even if the research proved futile, he had at least set up the pattern of attack. He was not therefore surprised when Porter’s next communication carried a note of enthusiasm.

  “Eric!” Porter was speaking from the computer room. “I think we’ve isolated the controlling factor. The computer has thrown up an interesting set of constants which give an extrapolation back to the time of our breaking the light barrier. The constants are independent of velocity or distance from point of origin, but they are related to elapsed time.”

  “How does this affect us?” Brevis asked.

  “Frankly it means the longer we stay in this state the larger we shall become. We’re like the proverbial exploding universe. Where stars can now float through the ship, soon it will be galaxies. Can you imagine . . .”

  “Shut up!” said Brevis sharply. “I’m trying to think. I don’t believe this is any accident, Paul. It’s rather what I suspected. Now think carefully. Is anything at all still tying us to the old universe? For instance, on what do we base our conception of measured time?”

  “All our instrumentation is related back to the master oscillator. That itself is synchronized with . . . Eric, you may just be on to something. Look, I’ve got some checking to do. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

  Brevis acknowledged the hastily broken connection with a raised eyebrow. His eyes automatically wandered to his precious drug cabinet. As an explorer of the human mind he had learnt the humility of the chemical modification of human outlook. Any mind-state could be conditioned for better or for worse by a few micrograms of the right substance in the bloodstream. He had drugs which could make his comrades accept their present situation with joy or equanimity, but nothing in any phial or bottle which could fire the spark of genius they needed to resolve the problem.

  His reverie was interrupted by Porter’s insistent buzz on the intercom.

  “Eric, I’ve got a lead. Don’t ask me how, but we’re still receiving timing pulses from the Tau Research transmitters. A ten kilocycles square wave
. Is this the sort of thing you were looking for?”

  “It could well be. What do we do with it?”

  “Use it to correct our own master oscillator. In effect we’re using it as a time reference for damn nigh every time constant on the ship—clocks, transmitter, instruments, computer—the lot. The master oscillator crystal is pulling like hell, but it’s still synchronized with the reference signal.”

  “So all our time referents are still tied to the old universe?”

  “Effectively, yes. What do you suggest we do?”

  “Turn the receivers off. Kill the signal.”

  “First let’s consider what that’s going to achieve. If the time constant has any bearing on the size of this ship, what happens if we cut adrift from it? We will lose our very last point of congruence with the universe. We’re already adrift in the three physical dimensions. If we lose congruence with time also, our chances of ever getting back would appear to be remarkably slight.”

  “Something’s controlling our size,” said Brevis. “And the computer’s proved it’s no casual relationship. But that controlling factor has caused us to become about four light years longer than we started out. I would guess that somehow our size is attempting to compensate for an untenable time constant to which we are tied regardless of velocity. As I see it, our only hope is to break every possible link so that our size determinator is a purely arbitrary factor. Then we have a chance to do some research into instituting our own control.”