A mocking smile played around the technician’s mouth and Aton realised the man was toying with him. He remained silent.
‘In any case,’ the technician continued after a pause, ‘the strat would appear to be what you called it just now: an ocean of potential time. For one thing, it has depth. It’s some years since the Church forbade any further deep-diving expeditions, but no doubt you know what happened to the earlier ones. The pressure of potential time gets stronger the deeper you go. Some of the ships had their ortho fields crushed.’
Aton shuddered slightly.
‘Do you resent what’s happening to you?’ the technician asked.
Aton shook his head, shrugging. ‘They say that I am a coward and a murderer. I don’t know if it’s true or not. But if it is, then this is just … for an officer.’ If he truly thought that he had committed those crimes, then he would almost have welcomed the punishment as a chance to redeem himself.
The technician rose. ‘Over here, please.’
A high-backed chair with dangling straps stood on the other side of the room. The two guards pinned Aton’s arms to his sides and forced him into it. The straps passed across his chest and over his thighs and forearms.
‘When your mission is accomplished you are instructed to die,’ the technician said softly. ‘The method will be the simple and direct one of vagal inhibition. To that end we will now implant a trigger word with which, at the appropriate time, you can excite your own vagus nerve and stop your heart.’
A needle pricked Aton’s arm. A coloured disc began to rotate in front of his eyes, attracting his gaze and holding it even against his will. A voice murmured soothingly in his ear.
Presently Aton fell asleep.
VOM.
When he awoke the word lay somewhere in his mind like a dead weight. He was vaguely aware of it, but he was unable to speak it, either aloud or mentally. That would not be possible until a certain phrase, spoken by a voice he would recognise when he heard it, released the word from its confinement.
The coloured disc wheeled away. In its place was put a more elaborate piece of apparatus that included, on the end of a flexible cable, what looked like the helmet of a diving-suit without a face-plate.
The technician glanced at his watch again and became more animated. ‘Time presses on. The dispatches you are to carry have already arrived. Now then. There are two reasons why we have to use live couriers to communicate with the time-fleets, and why those couriers have to be expendable. In the early days we tried other means – fast launches and one-man boats. But the time-drive is too bulky and expensive for such an application, especially if it is to have sufficient speed. So we evolved the method that will propel you. A massive generator will build up tremendous potential; that energy will be used to catapult you through the strat at high speed – much faster even than a battleship can move – and will give you sufficient momentum to reach your destination.
‘At first this method was tried out on unmanned missiles and even men in strat suits, but they would not do. The missiles got lost without a hand to guide them through the strat’s turbulence. A strat suit falls down on several counts: it’s bulky and so raises the energy requirement, its batteries would be able to maintain an ortho field only over short journeys anyway, and in any case using a strat suit defeats the whole object of the exercise because a courier needs to see the strat with his own eyes. It might work if we could include a scan screen such as a timeship has, but the weight of that would be prohibitive.
‘You will have some equipment with you, which will help you steer yourself towards your target. But what all this means is that for a while you’re going not just to see but to live in nonsequential strat time: in four-dimensional and five-dimensional time. No one can tell you what that will be like. Nevertheless we have to train you as well as we can so you’ll be able to carry out your task.’
The diving-helmet was lifted over Aton’s head to rest on his shoulders on a harness of foam rubber. He was in darkness. The technician’s voice came to him again, tinnily through the tiny earphones.
‘The purpose of this apparatus is to familiarise you, however inadequately, with what you will see immediately on entering the strat. It’s a mock-up, of course, since we cannot reproduce the real thing. The important thing for you to learn is how to keep your direction. Remember that reaching your destination is the only way you can ever leave the strat, and therefore the only way you can ever die. This, I assure you, will become your most vital concern.’
Suddenly Aton was assailed by an explosion of sense impressions. So meaningless were they that they seemed to be pulling each of his eyes in separate direction. He closed his eyes for a few moments, but when he opened them again the barrage had increased in intensity. A steady bleeping sound was in his ears.
He felt as though he was swaying back and forth.
Eventually he began to glimpse recognisable shapes that emerged out of the welter of images and just as quickly vanished again. At this point the technician’s voice entered again and in persuasive tones provided a running commentary.
The ordeal continued for about half an hour. The technician taught him how to know when he had changed direction from his appointed course and how to correct it with the equipment he would be given. At last the helmet was lifted from his head and the restricting straps unfastened. Somewhat disoriented, Aton rose.
‘Well, you seem to have got the hang of it,’ the technician announced.
‘Half an hour’s training? You really think that is enough?’ Aton asked in a blurred voice.
‘Perfectly. Your mission is not too difficult. Merely harrowing.’
Aton was trying to form an idea that had just occurred to him. ‘Why … do we have to die?’
The other looked at him, puzzled. ‘You are condemned men.’
‘I know that. But why such an elaborate method? Oh, I know the practical reason for the hypnotic conditioning: men of the Time Service should not have to dirty their hands by executing condemned criminals. So the criminals have to do it themselves. But why are you so careful to ensure that the couriers should die after only one trip? Why not use them again? It seems to me that their usefulness is not finished.’
The technician looked thoughtful and withdrawn. ‘There is no doubt, a reason,’ he murmured. ‘Frankly, I do not know what it is. But everything has a reason. I never heard of anyone going into the strat twice.’
‘The fleet commanders have strict orders not to allow a courier to live after arrival, not even for a few hours. Why? What would be the harm?’
‘An act of mercy, perhaps.’ The technician glanced up at a winking light on the wall. ‘It’s time to fit you out.’
A section of wall slid aside. Aton, the two guards at his back, followed the technician into a narrow circular tunnel that sloped sharply downward. They emerged after a few minutes into a place totally unlike the clinical briefing-room Aton had just left. It was a large area with walls of flat, grey metal. A heavy droning hum came from an incredible array of equipment that took up the further end of the space.
The power of the droning sound struck right into Aton’s bones. He gazed briefly at a large circular metal hatch that was clamped to the far wall with bolts and fitted with view windows. Then he was being tugged to one side where white-coated men eyed him speculatively.
A hoarse shout made him look to the other end of the room. A bizarrely accoutred figure was being dragged struggling towards the metal hatch. The man wore what appeared to be a tray, or small control board, extending outwards from his waist. His face was obscured by a rubber breathing-mask, and his body was criss-crossed with straps. Alongside the trio of prisoner and guards, contrasting with their exertions, paced the calm figure of a comforter, sprinkling holy wine from an aspersorium.
The muffled shouts grew more desperate as the disc of steel swung open. With practised skill the courier was eased inside and the hatch bolts screwed tight.
‘That’s more commonly the ma
nner of their exit,’ the technician remarked to Aton. ‘I may say I find it a pleasure to be dealing with someone who has more nerve.’
Aton ignored the praise. The humming sound swelled, grew to climactic proportions, then ended in a noise like a prolonged lightning strike, accompanied by a vivid flash from within the dispatch chamber.
A singing silence followed. For some moments the air was charged with energy.
The technicians began to equip Aton for his journey. First the dispatch case was strapped to his chest. Then came the tray-like control panel, fastened around his waist so as to bring its knobs within easy reach of his hands.
During the session under the simulator Aton had been told that he would be aware of his proper course by reason of something mysteriously described as ‘like a wind blowing in your face’. This wind represented his initial momentum. The control tray was a device acting like a rudder; it would enable him to guide himself along his course like a speedboat.
He felt the prick of hypodermic needles as stimulative drugs were pumped into his veins. An oxygen mask and earphones were added.
The comforter appeared by his side and began to murmur words he could scarcely hear. He felt the cold touch of drops of wine. He was ready.
The steel hatch swung open.
As he was propelled unresistingly towards the hatch and glimpsed the narrow rivet-studded chamber it guarded, a fog seemed to dissipate from his mind. Suddenly, and for the first time, he understood clearly and vividly just what was happening to him.
And he understood why!
His amnesia lifted like a curtain. He recalled the terrible events on board the Smasher of Enemies: his discovery of heresy within his command, the repeated savage hammer blows sustained by the ship, and Sergeant Quelle in a strat suit striding along surrounded by fellow heretics.
The rest was plain. Who had put him aboard the life raft he did not know – his memory ended some time before that – but evidently the heretics had reached the raft too. They must have suffered agony to realise that once they were rescued Aton could denounce them, and his subsequent amnesia must have seemed almost miraculous to them. They had taken full advantage of it, bringing their false charges against him so as to rid themselves of a potential accuser. A desperate, daring manoeuvre.
And what had caused Aton’s loss of memory? A glimpse of the strat.
Would he recognise it a second time?
He turned, about to say something even as he realised that it was too late now to offer the truth. But he was given no time to speak. They bundled him through the circular hatch and swiftly screwed it up behind him.
He stood in a replica of the standard octagonal execution chamber. Death seemed to seep visibly into the cramped space from the leaden walls, which gave the appearance of being several feet thick. There was a peculiar tension in the air he had experienced only once before: when he had helped to remove the protective shields from an operating time-drive to effect emergency repairs.
A face peered in at him through the view window, distorted and blurred by the immensely thick plate. As the powerful generators swung into action a drumming noise assailed Aton, making the walls vibrate. The noise built up, deafening him. Despite the oxygen mask a feeling of suffocation seized him. He felt as though he had been seized by a giant hand that squeezed, squeezed, squeezed –
And then a numbing blow hit him on all sides at once and the chamber vanished. He had the impression of being shot forward at tremendous speed as though out of the mouth of a cannon.
Utter darkness. Blinding light. Which was it?
It was neither. It was whirlpools of the inconceivable. It was visions which the eye accepted but which the brain found unrecognisable: reality without the sanity that made reality real. The brain reacted to these visions with terror and dwindled in on itself to seek refuge in death or unconsciousness. Such sanctuary was denied Aton, however. The drugs that coursed in his blood pre-empted the closing down of the mind and condemned it to full alertness.
Yet alongside this jarring shock was a start of recognition. He remembered it now. This was what he had seen for a bare instant aboard the Smasher of Enemies.
Aton went reeling and spinning on a five-dimensional geodesic. There was no point of comparison to the space or time that he knew. The wind of the strat blew against his face like a cloying mist composed of ghostly pseudo-events, and whenever it ceased or lessened, his hands went instinctively to the control knobs at his waist.
But this phase, in which his mind still clung to its allegiance to passing time, lasted only seconds. Then the continuum of the strat seeped into his every cell and time ceased.
Eternity began, and Aton’s sanity disintegrated.
Luckily one did not need to be sane to accomplish one’s mission. One needed to know that there was an escape, that one could die. One needed to know that failure would mean to sink endlessly into the strat.
Therein lay the cunning of the courier system. Neither the senses nor the intellect could understand the environment in which they found themselves, but some primeval instinct enabled the mind to find a direction. The courier strove with all his being to reach the distant receiving station where he would be permitted to stop his heart.
Until that goal was attained, Aton lived in a world that was timeless. He could not measure the duration of his journey either in seconds or in centuries, because there was no duration. There could be no such thing as duration without a before and an after, and in this state nothing preceded and nothing followed. He skirled and spun. He went through titanic processes where five-dimensional objects menaced him as though they were living beings, but nothing began and nothing ended.
After a while his brain seemed to revive and to attempt to recover its old mode of perception. It was, he realised, beginning to come to terms with the five-dimensional strat and to abstract three-dimensional worlds from it.
Captain Mond Aton lived his life over again, beginning with conception and ending with his being sealed into the dispatch chamber at Chronopolis. After that, everything was just a vague shadow.
The illusion – could it be called an illusion? – was absolutely real. Every incident, every pleasure, every pain, and every effort exercised his soul anew. And not merely once. His life became like a film strip and was run through hundreds, thousands, millions of times over. The continued, reiterated experience became unbearable.
Interspersed with this continual re-enactment were other experiences that were more or less intelligible. At first he thought he had somehow been dumped back into orthogonal time in a different body and a different life. But soon he realised that the dreamlike episodes that so much resembled events in the real world were phantoms: mock-ups located in the strat. The strat was eternity. And eternity, as he had learned at training college, was the storehouse of potentialities. Somewhere in this vast insubstantial ocean were mock-ups of everything existing in orthogonal time, as well as of every fictitious variation of what existed. And also there were mock-ups of that which did not exist but which could be thrown up into the world like flotsam on a beach by some convulsion of the strat.
After enduring all this for millenniums, or microseconds, an odd feeling of strength came over Aton. The strat was no longer so strange to him. It was as if he himself was transforming into a five-dimensional being. He was able to look down on his life as an entirety and give his attention to any part of it.
Sequential time would seem, after this, flat and narrow. But his fingers still moved over the steering controls. His mind still strove to release itself in the only way possible.
His target, a fleet of timeships, loomed ahead of him. Protected by their own orthogonal time-fields they stood out clearly as glowing solid bodies surrounded by the swirling strat. Aton’s earphones were beeping as he came within range of the homing signal.
Then he whirled around as something darted in suddenly from one side. It was the image of a man, which he saw sometimes as a three-dimensional figure and sometimes as
a four-dimensional extension. The man was burly, bedecked like a stage magician in a flowing cloak and coloured hose. In place of eyes his sockets were filled with glittering, flashing jewels. He grinned wolfishly at Aton, at the same time directing a bazooka-like tube from which issued a billowing exudation.
The purple mist struck Aton like a physical force. He felt his whole body vibrate; he veered aside to avoid the attack.
The intruder lunged at him again. Hissing, the bazooka tube went into action for a second time, and Aton saw that what it actually did was to distort the substance of the strat. With alarm he felt himself being sucked into the turbulence; he worked his rudder controls frantically.
Then both the apparition and the strat fled. He stood limply in a steel-clad chamber identical to the one he had left an eternity ago, and a loud humming noise filled his ears.
Just before the grinning jewel-eyed man had pounced Aton had recognised the galleon-like battle wagon that was to receive him. As irony would have it, the ship was Commander Haight’s Lamp of Faith.
FIVE
Exhausted with fear and fatigue, Inpriss Sorce collapsed with a sigh on to a rickety couch. She pushed straggled hair out of her eyes and looked around the cheap, dismal room she had just rented.
The two weeks since she had escaped from Chronopolis had nearly driven her insane.
It was lucky she had taken the satchel containing money and bank cards from her apartment in Kell Street, otherwise she would have been completely helpless. Her one thought had been to flee as far away as possible. Everyone knew that once the Traumatic sect had chosen someone for sacrifice they would do everything possible to track the victim down and complete the rite.
Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis Page 56
