New Writings in SF 22 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Kenneth Bulmer

  ‘If the cables snapped?’

  ‘The station would stop moving. They’re at the gravitational equilibrium.’

  ‘But the city is moving now. Why?’

  ‘To stay where it is.’

  Sitting upright in his hotel bed, Gerdun Mann wished that he had stayed where he was: on the Moon. At least there he knew how everything related to everything else, even if he spent most of his time working in brilliant sunlight that would fry him if his life-supports failed, and a vacuum that would suffocate him if he opened his face-plate. That made an unpleasant kind of sense; but what he had seen that day made very little sense at all.

  ‘It stays where it is by moving?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Langham had instructed the camera-operator to zoom in on the underside of the station. ‘It moves very slowly ... about one-hundredth of a mile an hour. The same speed, incidentally, at which this transporter we’re in moves.’

  For as long as he could remember his own thoughts, Mann had been used to the idea that if one stood in one place long enough one would find oneself in precisely the same place. Now he thought about it, perhaps it was this that made him like the act of reading books. If he stared at a page, it always contained the same amount of information however long he took over it. He could read something twice over, refer back if he wished. The audio-visual devices which were so popular now, though, had no such luxury; they swept you on, never letting you slow down or reconsider.

  This world that Langham had shown him was like that. The ground moved. It wasn’t like Earth, where everything was solid and permanent; the ground moved.

  It came down from the north pole, moved towards the equator.

  It was slow—just over one hundredth of a mile an hour—but it never stopped. Stand still long enough, and you wouldn’t be in the same place. The ground would carry you inexorably towards the equator.

  ‘If the equator is infinite,’ Mann had said uneasily, ‘where does the ground go to... ?’

  Here Langham had looked worried.

  ‘This is where our knowledge of this situation becomes hypothesis,’ he said. ‘Remember we are seeing only the northern hemisphere—if that is the word—of this world. There is a southern hemisphere too, also hyperboloid. Mathematically, a hyperbola meets its axis at infinity and crosses to a negative value. If this is so, then the ground crosses from north to south hemispheres at the equator, and moves on down to the south pole.’

  ‘And then where does it go?’

  ‘It reappears at the north pole, and the process is repeated.’

  Gerdun Mann had rediscovered the childhood pleasures of biting his nails.

  ‘You would think nothing of flying around the world,’ said Langham. ‘Fly far enough and you return to your starting-place. The difference here is that the planet does the work for you.’

  He showed Mann a model of the world that one of the men had built. It was shaped roughly like a gyroscope, with tall thin poles and a sloping disk for the equator.

  Langham said: ‘At a distance of approximately two and a half thousand million miles from the point of equilibrium the ground is travelling at the speed of light. Beyond that we cannot see it, though it does indeed continue for infinity.’

  ‘The planet has an effective radius of two and a half thousand million miles?’

  Langham nodded.

  ‘But that’s roughly the size of the Solar System!’

  ‘Of our Solar System.’

  It was at this point that Mann had decided that he would, after all, appreciate an early night.

  He lay back on his bed in the Oporto hotel-room, turned off the light and listened to the traffic outside. That was a new enough experience after eighteen months on the Moon. There were a lot of people out there, and that was interesting in itself. He’d like to get used to that idea alone before trying to absorb anything else that Langham could tell him.

  In spite of his own expectations to the contrary, the man who had travelled a quarter of a million miles to be shown a world whose size exceeded that of the known Solar System slept soundly and without interruption.

  * * * *

  Three

  When the Council of Navigators made a decision, it was implemented at once. The same day that Lerouex was found dead, another Bridge-Builder was nominated as head of the Guild, and work commenced.

  Future Mann suddenly found himself very busy.

  There were few men who were accustomed to travelling north, and most of them were Future-Surveyors. Now the route across ground was clearly surveyed there was little work for the Futures to do in the normal way, and they were seconded to working with the Bridge-Builders.

  The general alert against the raiders was not slackened and the heavy defence-lines of the Militiamen were not weakened in any way. Most of the other people, though, became involved in the new work. Timber was the most urgently needed commodity, and a mile before the present crisis the city had passed a heavily-wooded area. Fortunately, the trees in the region had a high cork-producing nature, and the buoyancy of this substance provided the foundations for the design of the pontoon.

  Being to the south of the city, the trees were away from the normal point of conflict with the raiders, and the men and women who went out to cut the timber were escorted by only a light guard. More defence was provided for those working in the north, and at the selected place on the bank where the construction work commenced the Militiamen built a small fortress.

  Privately, Future Mann had his doubts about the efficacy of the project. He had been in the city on several occasions when it had been obliged to cross water ... but never such water as this. That last conversation he had had with Lerouex had worried him; if the city could not go on and was obliged to stop, what then ? Worse, if the city did go on and the bridge was not strong enough, it could founder.

  But no one could see an alternative. So Future Mann worked with the others. He hauled timber, he sank piles, he waded in the shallows of the river, securing the first pontoons to the shore. He trusted the Bridge-Builders because there was no one else to trust. They had their task, and they had always done it well. But several times Mann heard quiet doubts expressed in unguarded moments, and these began to erode his confidence.

  At first he attributed these uncertainties to the fact that when men who normally spent a large part of their time in or around the city came this far north the strange nature of the environment often disconcerted them. He, as a Future-Surveyor, spent much of his time in the north, and grew accustomed to the sight of the southern regions spreading out behind him. He was used to seeing the limitless northern vista, the sharp lines of the horizons dropping off to north-west and north-east. But men quickly adjusted to this, and the quiet fears of the Bridge-Builders grew more pronounced as days passed.

  They were engineering fears. The strength of the pontoons. The amount of wood available. The security of the stays On the bank. The still-unresolved question of where future pontoons would lead.

  Every day, Future Constant would ride out to the construction-site, ostensibly to inspect the progress of the work, but in reality to stare northwards with his Surveyor’s eyeglasses, seeking the still-elusive opposite bank.

  Future Mann’s own doubts were reinforced when suddenly he and the other Surveyors working on the pontoon were recalled to the city.

  It had been decided, as a contingency-plan, that an alternative route to the west or east would be sought. The work on the pontoons was to continue, but if a narrower part of the river could be found then the city would steer towards it.

  Future then realised that the Council of Navigators was aware of the hazardous nature of the pontoon-bridge. Only once or twice in all the history of Earth had the city deviated to one side or another.

  Destaine’s Directive was explicit: the city must move north, due north. Any movement to one side or another must be compensated for by a return to the original path, and overall northerly velocity must be maintained.

  In theory, t
his presented no difficulty, but in practice any deviation from true north in excess of twelve degrees put strain on the nuclear winches. A few hundred miles before, the city had deviated to avoid a mountainous region, and had moved for more than eighty miles at an angular deviation of thirty degrees, and another hundred miles at twenty degrees to return them to their original line. The damage then caused to the bearings of the traction-equipment by the necessary increase in speed was still not fully repaired.

  Future Mann was instructed to explore many miles to the west of the city, and other Surveyors took other routes, some to the west and some to the east. Mann knew that the regions he covered were sometimes thirty or forty degrees away from true north, and that even if he did find a safe route the nuclear winches might break down entirely under the strain.

  In any event, his reports were the same as those of all the other Surveyors. However far to either side they explored, they came eventually to the river that lay in their path. It would have to be crossed, and there was nowhere that presented even a hint of an opposite bank.

  * * * *

  Towards the end of the 20th Century, an Australian particle physicist named Francis Destaine developed a process which he called transliteration. When some of its effects were first publicised, the popular press latched on to it as an anti-gravity device, though in fact this was a distortion of the true state of affairs.

  Treating gravitation conceptually as a field phenomenon analogous to that of electromagnetic radiation, with a ‘graviton’ as the supposed elementary particle, Destaine devised a field-generator which created a region of space in which normal rules of gravitation did not apply. He discovered, for instance, that gravity could be cosmically repulsive—as opposed to attractive—and it was this that earned the label of anti-gravity. In fact, the energy consumed by his field-generator was so great that there could be no practical application for what he had discovered.

  It was during this period that the need for natural energy-resources became critical. Though fusion reactors were theoretically possible, no one had yet discovered a way of containing the prodigious amounts of released energy. Fossil fuels were being used up rapidly, and there seemed to be no long-term solution to the world-wide energy shortage.

  It was in this climate that Destaine was working. As his generator consumed vast amounts of energy with no apparent yield, he was unable to obtain official backing. Even when he claimed to have discovered a natural transliteration ‘window’ on Earth, where its effects could be harnessed by his generator to produce what he said would be unlimited amounts of electrical energy, he was unable to raise the necessary funds.

  Finally, by methods unknown, Destaine raised the money privately.

  Obtaining permission from the Russian government, he and a large staff of researchers and technicians assembled a mobile transliteration generator in the Yakutskaya province of Northern Siberia. It was here, said Destaine, that the natural transliteration window existed.

  In spite of amused contempt from other scientists, Destaine persevered with his work. Meanwhile, in lieu of large quantities of electricity emanating from Northern Siberia, normal research into conventional energy-production continued.

  Approximately six months after Destaine moved to Yakutskaya, his backers announced that he, his staff and his mobile station had suddenly ceased reporting. A search of the area was conducted, but without results. A few weeks later it was established that, inexplicably, all trace of Destaine and the others had vanished.

  There was much evidence of activity in the area ... particularly in the form of tracks in the snow and discarded pieces of equipment ... but of the mobile station, which weighed over sixty tons, of the eighty-three people aboard it and of Destaine and his now famous graviton field-generator there was not a single sign.

  In time, the mystery was forgotten, though every now and then the media would rehearse some of the more fascinating aspects of the disappearance.

  Destaine’s work, though, had an unexpected legacy. The original backers, seeking to recoup some of their original investment, hired more researchers and alternative uses for the transliteral generator were sought. Finally, an adapted form of the field was found to be powerful enough to be used as a barrier in nuclear reactors, and fusion power became a reality.

  Transliteral physics became a reality, too. More natural transliteration windows were discovered—though Destaine’s original one in Russia was never located—and in much the way that he had speculated, large quantities of electrical power could be derived by tapping these gravitational fault-zones with a graviton generator.

  There was a minor difficulty: the transliteration windows moved.

  To tap the energy, the graviton generator had to be moved at exactly the same speed as the transliteration window: speeds varied marginally, but were usually in the region of one-hundredth of a mile an hour.

  Then, almost one hundred and twenty-seven years after Destaine’s disappearance, a new transliteration window was discovered in Northern Spain. A Destaine generator was assembled, and preparations were made to commence tapping the power. But scientific curiosity was being aroused by these transliteration windows: what was on the other side?

  A firm in Geneva designed a portable transliteration generator that would allow a man to pass through. A volunteer was found ... and he passed through.

  He found himself in terrain almost exactly like that which he had just left. But the horizons were wrong. The ground appeared to be concave. In one direction the ground curved up towards a distant point ... in the other it flattened out into a vast and apparently limitless plain.

  And hauling itself across that plain, on a crude arrangement of tracks and cables, was Destaine’s original station.

  * * * *

  ‘That’s the mobile generator Destaine built,’ said Langham, pointing at the screen.

  Gerdun Mann, now physically refreshed but suffering under some mental strain, stared at the station.

  ‘You said it had disappeared in Russia,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. But that was a hundred and twenty-seven years ago. This transliteration window was discovered only recently, and is presumably the same one Destaine found. I told you, the windows move.’

  ‘And the movement roughly correlates with the movement of the ground through there.’

  ‘No, it correlates exactly. Since it disappeared, Destaine’s station has covered about eleven and a half thousand miles. For more than a hundred years it has been crossing a transliteral analogue of Asia and Europe. It is now, as we are, in Portugal.’

  Langham instructed the camera-operator to pan ahead of the station. There, now appreciably nearer, was the expanse of water.

  ‘So far Destaine’s station has always been on land. The sea is not in their experience. The people in the station have started to build a bridge ... across the Atlantic Ocean!’

  * * * *

  Four

  As a Surveyor, Future Mann was intrinsically out of sympathy with the Terminator movement. He had been trained to see the ground that lay before the city as its future environment. The ground that lay behind was in the past, its usefulness fulfilled and spent. It was from the future that came the trees and crops that fed and sustained the people of Earth, the herds of wild animals that provided meat and a means of local transport.

  In the past lay danger; Destaine’s Directive could not be clearer.

  It would be a temptation to stand in the way of our northwards progress, he wrote. But such a temptation must be resisted absolutely. Danger and almost certain death lie to the south of us. No man nor any of his artefacts could withstand the gravitational stresses and centrifugal forces that obtain in the south. We must maintain position ... somewhere to the north lies our window to safety.

  So it was written into the very constitution of the city that the north was synonymous with safety. How then, thought Future Mann, would Destaine have confronted such a river as this ? Could this be the window of which he had written
?

  He stood now in the crowded central square of the city, watching the Terminators’ public meeting.

  It was the first time in the history of the city that they had come out into the open, for by their very principles they stood for an ideal that directly contradicted Destaine’s words. There had always been Terminator thought in the city, once, it was rumoured, in the person of a president Navigator. But always in the past the Terminator movement had stayed out of sight, and out of general credibility.

  So many people in the city had now seen the river for themselves, or had heard first-hand reports of it, that there was no longer any doubt that this was indeed the greatest single natural obstacle the city had ever had to face. The Terminators at last had a good case, and they no longer saw the need to hide that case from the people.

  ‘—stop the city, destroy our winches. This is fertile soil, we need not cross any river to find better-’