Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

Prevoyance Three

  Methuen’s third prevoyant dream was troublesomely sequential to the prior ones. Its dream-date was 20 January 2465, and he had been assigned as expert consultant to the chief of Norwestian Civil Intelligence Service with full-time duty on the question of the two attacks. At the moment, he was in the chiefs office, telling him: “Sir, I really believe that this hunch of mine ought to be explored. I have kept having this feeling of 546 in connection with both prior disasters, and we have just about concluded that they must be extraterrestrial attacks. My point is, that we have recently established the extension of the five-forty-six gradient at least as far out as the star Bellatrix; and this gradient happens to be dead-on with the star Saiph—”

  The intercom sounded; the chief took it, allowing Methuen to hear it Male private secretary’s voice: “Sir, I have a call from the Army Chief of Staff. At least five army bases have come up with inactive rekamatic missiles and unexplodable conventional cartridges. He had to cut off for other business, but he wants you to call him back.”

  “Right, get him now,” said the chief. He turned to Methuen. “Even if you are right, Captain, I don’t know what we can do about it. Erth has no defense of any kind at all.” “Not quite no defense,” Methuen countered. “Remember that a number of spaceships were already cruising before ship-inactivation and are still out there. . , . Hey, oh God, Chief, let me preempt your phone!”

  He seized it and put in a priority call to the Fleet Admiral. “Sir, Methuen here. I urge that you immediately fire orders to all cruising ships: stay away from the five-forty-six gradient! Repeat—”

  Part Three

  A MARVELOUS DAY IN

  SPACETIME

  Day Zero

  15

  Over breakfast in pajamas and lounging robes—a hearty breakfast, dialed of course by now-lightly-clad Dorita— Methuen complained of a warm draft despite the air-conditioning; and this led him to discover the broken-out window. He hurried to it, studied it, peered out (thrusting head and neck within a rim-border of jagged glassoid more than large enough to pass a man’s body), inspected environs up and down and sideways, pulled back in; Dorita and Zorbin were watching him.

  “It’s new since we went to bed!” the captain exclaimed, “Dorita, what did you hear?”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Nothing,” averred both men. Methuen added, “But we were asleep behind closed doors, and you were right in this room!”

  Wide-eyed she lied. “I guess I was pretty soundly asleep.” An idea for diversion occurred to her, and she was alarmed by the time she announced it: ‘There is something else that I do hear right now, and that is Quarfar’s breathing.”

  The men listened, frowning at each other. “I’d better check,” Zorbin volunteered; and he went to Quarfar’s door and knocked. No response. Zorbin went in. He reappeared, face grim: “Come here, both of you.”

  Quarfar lay on his back, eyes open, face and hands and body sweat-wet, breathing a hideous mighty rasping.

  Methuen said: “Saul, alert emergency at Astrofleet General Hospital, top government priority, and order an ambulance with oxygen equipment and the rest of it. Then notify AI-magor.” Dorita had fled to the bathroom; as Methuen bent over sick Quarfar, she returned with a fever thermometer and thrust it into the titan’s open mouth under his tongue and closed his lips around it, then departed for the kitchenette. Methuen held Quarfar’s lips closed, although this made the patient’s breathing more difficult. Dorita returned with ice in a towel and another cold-wet towel, put the ice compress on Quarfar’s forehead and bathed his face and body, while Methuen removed the thermometer and whistled, allowing Quarfar again to seek open-mouthed breath.

  Zorbin returned: ambulance en route; Almagor notified, he’ll be there; then he went into the living room and flung wide the broken window, while Dorita continued her ministrations and Methuen phoned a secretary at Astrofleet: “Emergency with Quarfar, cancel 0900 task-force meeting at apartment, have task force convene at 1000 in Astrofleet Hospital lobby, we’ll arrange something.” During that call, a solichopper-ambulance drifted to the open window; two medics entered through the window with a stretcher, picked up the patient, took him out the window into the ambulance and whirred away, working on Quarfar.

  At 1046, a supervising nurse came into the visitors’ lobby, identified the members of the task force (seven of them today), and invited them to follow her. She took them to the executive staff conference room, seated them along two sides of the long table near its head, assured them that the chairman would meet them in a few minutes, and served coffee.

  At 1107, Methuen (at last wearing four sleeve-stripes on his jacket) entered with Zorbin, Dorita, Almagor and the assistant secretary of ESC. Methuen offered the head-table seat, first to his chief, then to Almagor; both deferred to the captain, who stood there while the other four seated themselves at his left and right.

  Said Methuen calmly: “Gentlepeople, we welcome four new task force members, but their introductions must await more pressing business. As you have been told, our prime subject, Quarfar, is gravely ill, they have him here under intensive care. Dr. Almagor is in close liaison with the hospital director who has kindly allowed us to conduct our morning business here, and if necessary our afternoon business also, permitting us to receive hourly bulletins about Quarfar. I have to say personally that—having known Quarfar, I am personally concerned, and so are Lieutenant Zorbin and Miss Lanceo.

  “Before we enter into anything else, I’d like for you to hear some comments, first from Dr. Almagor, then from the assistant secretary.” Methuen sat.

  Almagor spoke from his seat, looking down, troubled. “I should tell you people that I feel unhappy and personally guilty about this. If you have studied with understanding the reports of our initial medical examinations, you know that among other things we tested Mr. Quarfar for antibodies against the full spectrum of known human diseases, and we found him well defended. Consequently I did not prescribe any special medical precautions when I released him into Captain Methuen’s custody.

  “It now appears that his lung tubercles have been invaded by some sort of virus growth which is entirely strange to us. We have nothing with which to attack it. He did not contract it inside the comet; this we know because the central comet ice has been exhaustively analyzed.

  “I do have a hypothesis, but I do not know how to test it. As you know, viruses mutate, producing new strains; and some very old strains become extinct. Quarfar may have harbored this virus fifty thousand years ago before he was caught by the comet; but at that time, perhaps he bad antibodies to keep it under control. During all those millennia of suspended animation, perhaps those particular antibodies died while the virus merely slept; this is far-fetched, I admit, since his other antibodies remained intact. Anyhow, this virus has now awakened and taken control.

  “We are working intensively in two directions. This hospital is using every known method of sustaining life in Quarfar; there is some faint hope that his body will develop or reawaken antibodies to fight off the virus for itself. At the same time, all members of the pertinent research staff at the Science Institute—all members—are working at the highest feasible speed to analyze the virus and learn how to attack it.

  “I will entertain questions.”

  But Almagor had answered almost all the questions that anybody could think of, given the uncertainties which he had expressed. Two questions were asked: “Can we see him?” and “Will he live?” The first was answered, “Not for several days, at least”; the second, “I do not know; and if he cannot live, I do not know how soon he will die.”

  The possibility of cloning Quarfar was not raised; as yet, human beings could not be successfully cloned, their nervous systems were too complex.

  Methuen nodded to the assistant secretary, who arose. “Gentlepeople, I will stand because reluctantly I must leave on other business. I appreciate the concerns here, and I want you to know that they are shared by the Norwestian and E
rthworld governments all the way up to Chairman Evans. We have placed all our resources at the disposition of Dr. Almagor in the hope that Mr. Quarfar will live and recover, for his sake and for ours.

  “My role here is threefold. First, I want to assure all of you that your work is valuable and should continue with top concentration even though you are temporarily or—perhaps permanently deprived of the services of Mr. Quarfar. Second, please be informed that my office has been continually monitoring several local and world-wide services in search of the escaped batwing monster, whose name I now understand to be Narfar; but so far, nothing; we will keep you informed. Finally, I wish to reiterate our confidence in your chairman, Captain B. J. Methuen, and to remind you that neither the disappearance of Narfar nor the illness of Quarfar was within the captain’s control to prevent.

  “Dr. Almagor, pray proceed with full institute energy. May I depart now—or are there questions?”

  There would have been some, undoubtedly; but Methuen, sensing departure-urgency, excused his chief, who left on the nod.

  Now Methuen stonily presented the four new arrivals, and presented the prior-arrived members and Zorbin and Dorita to them. He reiterated the charges to the task force and its listing of primary problems as expanded in yesterday morning’s meeting.

  He turned then to Olga Alexandrovna. “Madam, we agreed that ancillary to all other problems was the question of language. You made some good inroads yesterday; is there any further progress?”

  “Only,” said Olga, “that I have been able to learn thoroughly the vocabulary already derived, to develop a preliminary form of structure for the language, and to do a little comparative study, which confirms that the structure and even some of the words more closely conform to pre-Tellene than to any other tongue I know. However, there are numerous departures from what we know of the pre-Tellene of ancient Mykenae; at the same time, the language of Quarfar is as complex as high Tellene in its conceptual flow, although it is not at all high Tellene, but fundamentally a different tongue.

  “For what my suspicion may be worth, these findings lead me to suspect that this very planet Erth was the one which Quarfar inhabited before he went to Dora. It is a most difficult hypothesis; how would he have crossed space to the other planet, wherever it may be? Our developing findings may easily knock down this guess. Nevertheless, the strong but less than perfect resemblance of Quarfar’s tongue to pre-Tellene is as though Quarfar in pre-ancient times had taught primitive pre-Tellenes the rudiments of his language, and they took it their way while he went on with his way. As an analogy, Gallia developed modern Gallic from its own Barbarian roots infused with a number of imported Ramie roots and structures.

  She turned to Methuen: “All my studies, Captain, have been based on the notion that they would develop a means of communicating with Quarfar. It is evident that I have a personal and professional stake in his recovery.”

  Resolutely Methuen was repressing the urge to report what Quarfar had told them privately last night. As Quarfar had observed, solutions ought to come from human inquiry and not from revelation; and certainly the linguist had gone far with her aspect of this process.

  He turned to Astrophysicist Sita Sari. “Madam, particularly in your province are two of our problems: the origins of Quarfar and Narfar, and the nature of the five-forty-six gradient. Any progress yet?”

  Small Sita Sari looked around at her colleagues with a wry little smile of semi-embarrassment that Methuen found somehow fey-charming. “I do have something,” she said, “but I’m afraid it will take me awhile to present, perhaps half an hour or so. Perhaps Dr. Chu or one of our new members would prefer to inject something first.”

  Chu and the other four negated with head-shakes. The lean black psychobiologist from North Africa, Dr. Harlo Ombasa, remarked in a basso almost as rich as Quarfar’s: “I do have a thing, but it can come later. I defer to Dr. Sari.”

  From having been momentarily feminine-charming, Sari now went precise and crisp: “These two problems—the origins of our aliens and the nature of the five-forty-six gradient—are tightly linked with each other and with the age, velocity, and trajectory of the comet.

  “The comet trajectory, as recorded off Bellatrix, appears linear, not curved. In the excellent observations which we have from Mr. Zorbin, I can detect no departure from this perfect linearity over a distance of nearly half a trillion kilometers. And this trajectory, extrapolated in both directions, is perfectly aligned with the five-forty-six gradient. Furthermore, the unusually high velocity of the comet suggests that it may have been accelerated by precisely that gradient.

  “Let me give a transient moment to the nature of the gradient. Captain Methuen was perceptive enough to take samplings of space along the route. As all of you probably comprehend, space is not a vacuum, but is instead a plenum of little random events the largest of which is much smaller than the smallest subnuclear particle yet identified. Because of their randomness, all proper samples of raw space will contain practically equal event-counts, equally distributed between positive and negative or ingressive and expressive events. Well, along this gradient, while the total number of events in each sample is the usual number, there is an overwhelming preponderance of negative events, and only a small minority of positive events.

  “Let me put it less technically. It is as though some mysterious object, traveling at near-instantaneous velocity, had created the gradient as a sort of wake by galvanizing all events in its path into negative expression and driving all positive ingression away from the path. The effect on other objects subsequently falling into this gradient would be to urge them along at heightened velocity in whichever direction they might happen to be traveling when they would enter the gradient.

  “I am not ready to guess how long so unique a gradient might persist, or how long ago this particular gradient was created, or what sort of object might have created it. Judging by the age of this comet and the evidence that it may have been traveling in this gradient almost since origin, the longevity of the gradient would seem to be astonishing.”

  She had her audience, all right!

  “As now we return to the question of the comet’s probable origin,” Sari continued, “I wish to give you a visual.” She produced a little projector from her purse; asked for and got room-darkening; and projected on the conference room’s parabolic screen a planar view of the northern celestial hemisphere, with all stars and constellations appearing just as they would to a viewer who might be standing at the north pole of Erth. She drew their attention particularly to the constellation Orion spreading in the right ascension range of 0500 to 0600 hours and in the declination range between minus 09°41’ and plus 09°55’; for she had considerately tilted the projection slightly, allowing fifteen degrees negative to show near Orion, at the expense of fifteen degrees positive near Camelopardalis.

  “Now,” she announced, “I am going to replace this planar projection, which is the way our eyes see the sky, with a holographic projection which takes account of the relative distances of the stars from Erth. You must understand that when we look at the sky with naked eyes, we lose perspective; the sky becomes a primitive inverted bowl, all stars appear equidistant from us, and therefore apparent constellations appear even though they are composed of stars whose distances from Erth vary by hundreds of light years. To illustrate this, as we shift to the holograph which is identically the same hemisphere of sky, I want you particularly to watch what happens to Orion.”

  They gasped. Orion went into total depth-distortion, its configurations vanished, it was no longer recognizable as a constellation.

  Sari proceeded calmly: “On this projection, which is surely familiar to Captain Methuen and Lieutenant Zorbin, it is possible to show the five-forty-six gradient with fair accuracy. Just at the center of this projection and in the near foreground of it, you will have noted a yellow circle: that represents Erth, and Sol also if you will. I am now going to cause a yellow line to go outward from Erth; it will repre
sent the five-forty-six gradient. Understand that the term five-forty-six represents the gradient’s right ascension of five hours forty-six minutes; but to make sense in the sky or in this holograph, the line must also follow the declination of the gradient, and that declination is minus nine degrees forty-one minutes.”

  They watched the yellow animated line emanate from Erth and move slowly outward to their left. After an appreciable number of seconds, the yellow line stopped near a star. “That star is Bellatrix,” she told them; “and although it is only four

  hundred seventy light-years distant, it is the nearest to us of all the stars in Orion. Let me show you.” She flashed back to the planar projection, and she placed a yellow arrow-light on Bellatrix: the left shoulder-star in Orion. “It would be too complicated to show the gradient on this planar projection; but flashing back now to the holograph,” (she did so) “we can see that the gradient narrowly misses Bellatrix—by about seventy light-years, in fact, which is just about where the comet passed Bellatrix and was pursued by Captain Methuen.”

  * Several grunts were audible.

  “Now,” Sari resumed, “let us suppose that the gradient continues for a great distance out beyond Bellatrix, but always with the same right ascension and declination. Let’s allow it to grow—” They watched the yellow line move outward, always with its tail connected to yellow Erth: another Bellatrix-distance, and still others. And it stopped, making a direct hit on a star. A yellow circle appeared around that star.

  “Let us turn again to the planar sky,” Sari purred, “and see what star that may be, and in what constellation.” Again Orion leaped into clear view, and already the yellow arrow-light was poised on a star which made the right foot of Orion. “The star, as you see, is Saiph. Its distance from Erth is two thousand one hundred light-years. The five-forty-six gradient makes a direct hit upon Saiph.