New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  * * * *

  Two

  The day that Gerdun Mann arrived in Europe from the Moon, all military operations were stopped. Mosta Langham, the current Director of the Department of Transliteral Geophysics, had a private consultation with the GOC land forces, and General Dula and his men were withdrawn temporarily. The last expedition into transliteral country had ended badly—two men killed, another five injured— and it was now clear that there was no solution by military means. Like Dula, Langham was only too aware of the lack of time, and he was no more pleased at the withdrawal than Dula. No army likes to be withdrawn before it can succeed.

  Gerdun Mann had been delayed. The shuttle from the Moon had landed him at Kennedy, and Langham had ordered that a private craft be waiting to bring him direct. Instead, Mann had taken a scheduled flight to London, and DTG agents had had to track him down again. He was on his way now, and Langham left instructions for him to be brought to the transporter as soon as possible.

  With nothing more to do until Mann arrived, Langham went to the transporter and stared at the screen. Now that Dula’s men had retreated once more, there were signs of activity around the station. There were more armed men than ever before around the cables, and when a small party of people left the station and walked across to a grove of wild olive-trees to pick more of the fruit, they were accompanied by several crossbow-bearing men. They stayed away from the station long enough to pick only a few baskets of fruit, then returned in some haste to the station.

  Langham moved from the screen and went outside.

  There, only a few hundred yards from where he stood, was another olive-grove, identical in almost every way to the one he could see on the screen. But, beyond it, no station.

  He heard the sound of an engine and looked up into the sky.

  Shielding his eyes against the sun, he saw a helicopter coming towards him, and a minute later it landed a few yards from where he stood. A tall young man, carrying a suitcase and a large parcel, was helped down from the craft by two other men. Langham walked across to meet him.

  ‘Are you Gerdun Mann?’ he shouted over the noise of the aircraft.

  Mann gave his suitcase to one of the two men, and walked unsteadily towards him. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Mosta Langham. I’m Director of the Department.’

  ‘Help me, will you ? I’m not used to the gravity yet.’

  Langham took the man’s arm and assisted him towards the transporter. He offered to take the parcel, but Mann shook his head and said he was all right. Behind them, the agent who had come from London with Mann walked with the suitcase. Langham noticed that Mann was wearing clothes totally unsuited to the climate and realised he must have come straight from London without an opportunity to change.

  When they were inside the transporter, and the agent had returned to the helicopter, Langham said: ‘Would you like to go to your hotel to wash and change?’

  ‘I’m all right for the moment. I understand there was an element of urgency in this visit.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Langham said. ‘It can wait another hour or so...’

  Mann shook his head. ‘I assure you, I’m not uncomfortable. I rather enjoy the heat.’

  Langham regarded him, saw that he was wearing at least three layers of clothes, and concluded that it must be colder on the Moon than he had imagined.

  ‘Very well. The situation is urgent, and the sooner we resolve matters the better. Everyone here is very grateful that you were able to come so promptly.’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down ?’

  Langham pointed to a chair in front of the screen console. ‘Sit there ... please. This is what we’ve brought you to see.’

  He switched on the screen, and Mann sat down. As the image resolved, Langham turned a control and selected a wide-angle view of the station and the surrounding countryside.

  Without further explanation, Langham called in two of his assistants from the motor-compartment of the transporter, dialled four cold drinks from the dispenser and made mental preparation—for perhaps the tenth time that day—to explain in simple terms a concept and situation that had threatened to dismay the finest brains in his own highly-specialised field. He didn’t think he could do it.

  * * * *

  The Council of Navigators was the only kind of government in the city of Earth. It had a tradition of being badly attended, but in the recent miles of crisis every session had been almost fully attended. Futures Constant and Mann had presented their report, then left. Now the Navigators had to agree on how they should act on that report.

  ‘There can be no question,’ said Navigator Olssen, the president of the Council, ‘that the safety of the city is in danger. We now know that ahead of us lies the greatest natural obstacle the city has ever had to confront: a river so wide that we cannot see its opposite bank. There is no doubt in my own mind that we have to cross it. I believe that all there is to discuss is how.’

  Olssen sat down, and as he had privately predicted, Navigator Jase got to his feet. Jase was the youngest of the Navigators currently in council, and had affiliated himself, in spirit if not in fact, to the movement in the city known as the Terminators.

  Jase’s speech was long and portentous. To Olssen’s mind he covered no new ground, but in effect restated the philosophy of the Terminators: there was no apparent purpose to the city’s continued journey northwards. Every mile the city covered revealed new threats to their existence. There was the fact of the gradual rise in average temperatures, the continuing threat of the raiders, the abundance of good soil and vegetation in this region. Now there was a new hazard in the form of this river. The time had come, Jase stated firmly, to turn off the winches for good, to let the tracks rust and the cables fray.

  He sat down to a spattering of applause from a few of his supporters.

  The traditional opposition-speech out of the way, Olssen called on Bridge-Builder Lerouex to list the possibilities. Lerouex was in attendance in an advisory capacity. An old friend of Olssen’s, he was in line for a Navigatorship and had realised that he was now presented with an engineering task of a magnitude no Bridge-Builder before him had ever had to face. That morning he had ridden north with Future Constant and seen the river for himself.

  After the customary compliments paid by an advisor to the Council, Lerouex got down to details. He addressed the president directly.

  ‘Navigator Olssen, as you know we normally employ one of two methods for crossing stretches of water. The first is by erecting a platform from one bank to the other, on which the tracks are laid. The other is to construct a pontoon bridge, which floats directly on the water. My Guild would normally advise the latter for wider stretches of water, but in this case I fear that it would not be possible. The reason for this is quite simply that either method of river-traversing requires the cables to be implanted on the opposite bank to provide traction. I have seen this river for myself; it is so wide that I assure you that even if we could locate the opposite bank we do not have cables long enough to reach it.’

  ‘Then what do you propose?’

  Lerouex shrugged.

  ‘I see no solution,’ he said. ‘At least, not in terms of a bridge. It occurred to me this morning that the only possible way of crossing this water would be to convert the city into a ship ... and of course this could not be effected in the time we have available.’

  A short silence followed this statement, the Council appreciating that, in effect, the Guild of Bridge-Builders was admitting defeat.

  Once more, Jase rose to his feet, and pointed out that Lerouex’ statement only lent weight to his point of view.

  As Jase sat down again, Lerouex walked out of the chamber. He knew it was an affront to the Council, that Olssen in particular would be offended; but he saw that he had nothing more to add.

  He sought out Future Mann, and found him at the rear of the city, facing south, staring into the distant past.

  Mann said: ‘What was the decision?’

>   ‘I don’t know. I left before the debate really began. I said all I could.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That we cannot build a bridge.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but felt it was your decision to make.’

  Lerouex stood beside him, and together they stared down at the ground moving slowly below.

  ‘I think I know what will happen,’ Lerouex said in a moment. ‘The Council will decide to build a bridge. They will want a pontoon bridge, and they will try to convert the traction of the city from winch-power to direct drive.’

  ‘Would that work?’

  ‘It’s been done before. Many miles ago. But the bridge itself wouldn’t work. No one can build a bridge that long. Not in the time we have. Not with the facilities we have.’

  ‘Suppose they decide to ?’

  ‘Then I will resign.’

  Mann looked at him in surprise. ‘Do you mean that?’

  Lerouex nodded. They stood in silence for a long time.

  ‘I’m not a Terminator, you know,’ said Lerouex eventually. ‘I know that the city must move. We cannot stop. Everything we live for depends on our continued ability to move northwards. I fear what would happen if we stopped. Our Guild is one of the oldest in the city. The first Bridge-Builder knew Destaine.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘It’s true. Destaine was killed very soon after the city was built. Shortly before he died he wrote the Directive, and it was to a man called Thannet that he gave it. Thannet was the founder of my Guild. Destaine’s Directive says that we cannot stop, that we must not stop. Nothing must interfere with progress. If we encounter water, we cross it. If we come to a range of hills, we climb them. If we come to a deep chasm, we go round it.’

  Future Mann said: ‘But what if we didn’t ? What would happen if we stopped?’

  Lerouex looked south, across the plain to the range of hills they had come through a few miles before. Behind the hills, rising up, was the low countryside beyond.

  ‘I think we will discover that shortly. The city will have to stop. It cannot cross that water. We shall have to turn off the winches, and if the raiders do not kill us all then gradually the movement of the ground will take the city southwards. Very surely, we will be borne towards the equator. When that happens, the city will be destroyed and everyone on it will be killed.’

  Future Mann frowned. He did not care to think about the city not moving. Every child born in the city was brought up with the over-riding teaching that the city must always move.

  Later that day, the decision of the Council was announced. The city would not stop. A bridge would be built, and it would be a pontoon. Work would commence immediately. The winches would be converted. The northwards journey would not be interrupted.

  So Lerouex’ prediction was accurate ... but he did not wait to learn the consequences. An hour after the decision was announced, he formally resigned from the Bridge-Builders’ Guild, and the following morning was found dead in his room. He had shot a crossbow-bolt into his own mouth.

  * * * *

  Gerdun Mann opted for an early night, and was conducted courteously to his hotel by Langham in person. He ate a good meal, undressed and showered. He got into bed, and opened the parcel of books he’d purchased in England. For a while he sifted through them, luxuriating in the white newness of the pages, the firmness of the bindings, the smell of recent glue in the spines. At length, he selected one and settled back to read it. He got through the first chapter, then put the book aside. For the first time in longer than he could remember his attention was distracted away from a book.

  He was thinking of what he had seen through Langham’s television scanner. Thinking of a world that was so like Earth—and in some senses was Earth—and yet totally strange. A mathematical abstraction of a planet that had the same volume as Earth, but possessed what Langham assured him was a surface-area of infinite size. Literally ... infinite.

  ‘But is it real?’

  ‘If you can believe what you see, then it is real.’

  A planet with north and south poles at infinity that didn’t revolve at all, and an equator which revolved at infinite speed.

  ‘But nothing can move faster than the speed of light.’

  ‘A sufficiently large rotating disk will have its circumference travelling at the speed of light. This world has an equator of infinite radius, and it rotates.’

  ‘But it’s not a disk.’

  ‘It’s shaped like a hyperbola.’

  Again and again, Langham had instructed the camera-operator to pan his instrument to and fro. Gerdun Mann had seen the geophysics station—altered and expanded in strange ways—standing on an incline of forty-five degrees.

  ‘That is the point of equilibrium,’ Langham had said. ‘The point at which gravity-stresses are the same as on Earth.’

  ‘They’re on a one-in-one slope.’

  ‘Not there. Gravity homes in on the centre of their world; the equilibrium position is the nearest point on the surface to this centre.’

  The camera panned to the left, towards the north of this world. The angle of the incline sharpened quickly—from forty-five to sixty, then seventy, then more than eighty degrees—and the resolution of the picture began to dim.

  ‘What’s the matter now ?’

  ‘Atmospheric haze. There ... you can see the water.’

  Mann looked, saw the faint glimpse of an expanse of water, seemingly flat now against the almost vertical wall of the world.

  ‘Why doesn’t it pour down ?’

  ‘Gravity homes in on the centre of the world, but it also homes in on the axis of revolution. We don’t know how. It causes stresses, and distortions.’

  The camera panned down and to the right, past the geophysics station and its strangely hostile inhabitants. Behind the station, to the south, the gradient flattened out quickly. Mann saw trees, hills and a small river.

  ‘The ground looks flat there.’

  ‘It is almost flat in our terms.’

  ‘Then why isn’t the station there ? Why is it halfway up the slope?’

  ‘It’s at the point of equilibrium. Gravity homes in on the centre of the world, and on the axis of revolution...and on the plane of that revolution. The distortions are immense, though it would be technically possible for a man to be there.’

  ‘So why isn’t the station there?’

  ‘Because it is safest where it is. Standing near it—as I have done—one feels as though one is on flat ground. If it did move too far to the south, then it would start to feel the effects of centrifugal force. On this world, centrifugal force is a considerable factor.’

  A planet of infinite radius has its equator travelling at infinite speed, even if its angular velocity is the same as on Earth.

  ‘It rotates once every twenty-four hours. They have night and day. Let me show you the Sun.’

  The camera-operator slotted a filter into the camera, and the picture darkened. In a moment, a bright cross-shape swam into view.

  ‘That’s the Sun.’

  Gerdun Mann gaped at it in disbelief. Instead of the brilliant sphere he had imagined, the Sun was shaped like a cross, the lateral arm slightly broader than the vertical.

  ‘That is the same shape as this world?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it has a radius of infinite size.’

  ‘At its equator, yes.’

  ‘But there isn’t room in the Universe for two objects of infinite size.’

  ‘Not in our Universe there isn’t.’ Langham told the camera-operator to relocate the geophysics station. ‘There’s a Moon too. And planets. And a lot of stars.’

  ‘All of infinite size.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

  For a long time the camera had rested on the geophysics station. Mann had watched this with fascination, seeing the curiously antiquated machine. It had been added to and extended, and was now several times larger than even modern-day stations.

&nb
sp; ‘You can see how they’ve adapted it. The caterpillar tracks have been removed, and the traction is provided by some arrangement with winches. Most of the superstructure has been removed, and replaced with makeshift buildings. You can’t see the tracks clearly from this angle, but there are four of them. The station has wheels beneath it, and these run along the tracks as the winches wind in the cables.’

  Mann had remarked to himself that it appeared as if the station were hanging on the cables, as if they prevented it from running backwards down the gradient.