Mindwarp

by James Follett

  Calen turned from the wall and looked quizzically at her. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Ewen affirmed.

  “In which case there must be something wrong with that silly gadget.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Jenine heatedly.

  Calen studied the banner more closely. “Is it upside-down?”

  “Of course not.”

  Calen grinned. “So you’ve found your dome, Ewen? Pity those seismograph things can’t show colours.”

  The commented angered Ewen. “Don’t be so damned stupid, Calen. A dome will possess dimensions. Whatever that is, it’s simply nothing.”

  “Can you scale these things?”

  “Of course.”

  “How far up is it?”

  “A long way,” said Ewen. “At least five times the height of this dome.”

  Calen dropped into a chair and contemplated the banner. There was silence in the room that Jenine was the first to break.

  “You don’t suppose…” Her voice trailed away.

  “We don’t suppose what?” Ewen asked.

  “It’s nothing…”

  “We might as well hear it.”

  “There was a technician-scholar who wrote a theory about a negative universe.”

  “A negative what?” Ewen demanded.

  “Wait,” said Calen rising. He left the room and returned with his datapad. He sat down with the machine on his lap and called up the index. “Ah… I have it. Technician-Scholar Blader Zallen?”

  “That’s him,” Jenine confirmed. “His name came up recently in a lecture on heresy.”

  “Born 240 years ago,” said Calen, glancing through the text on his screen. “Father Zallen’s claim to fame, or rather, infamy, is that he wrote a paper on the possibility of a negative universe. We know that the universe consists of infinite rock. It extends forever and is one of the great mysteries of the GoD. And we also know that our living space, Arama, is most definitely very finite. Father Zallen had the crazy notion that there was a negative universe - a universe that was the complete reverse our universe. He suggested that in this negative universe, living space, such as we have in Arama, was infinite - that it went on forever, and that rock was finite.”

  Ewen struggled to picture such a universe and gave up.

  “It’s impossible to visualise,” said Jenine, frowning. “He was either very clever or very stupid.”

  “The Imperial Court thought the latter,” Calen continued. “He was given an opportunity to recant but he refused. So, he was stripped of his medallion, mindwarped, and tossed out of the Centre…” He flipped a page. “He died ten-years later in a mental home having been certified as insane. His theory was left on file as an example to us all of the stupid, illogical heresies that man is capable of… So if I were you, children, no more talk about negative universes.” He switched off his datapad and regarded his fellow students thoughtfully. “Have you considered the possibility that your nothingness is a horizontal fissure running through the rock?”

  “It’s too big,” Ewen objected. “It has no means of support - at least, nothing that shows up on that.” He nodded to the banner.

  “But you don’t know how big it is,” Calen observed. “You’re basing everything on one result from one test bang, or whatever it is you do, made at one location. Correct?”

  “Several tests, but one location,” Ewen agreed. “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m about to suggest the obvious,” said Calen patiently. “It seems to me that the first thing you should do is repeat your tests at, say, the extremities of Arama-”

  Both Ewen and Jenine saw immediately what Calen was driving at.

  “That’ll be bound to give us a solid rock result,” said Jenine excitedly. “And then we work our way in towards the centre of Arama to discover where the nothingness starts.”

  Calen beamed. “Precisely. That way you’ll be able to fine-tune your tests and establish the exact area of this fissure, or whatever it is. Who knows, it might prove useful. Water storage or something. The GoD doesn’t create space without good reason.”

  “We could make an early start tomorrow,” said Jenine eagerly. “Do all the tests in one day if we plan them properly. I’m dying to see the results. You’ll cover for me at tomorrow’s lectures, won’t you, Calen?”

  “Only if you promise to clear up this dreadful mess first.”

  7.

  Ewen’s and Jenine’s explosive tour of Arama went smoothly at first. Following an itinerary planned by Jenine, they worked their way around the periphery of Arama on the chord-metro system, carrying out their tests at stations nearest those points on the plan that would give optimum results. By the tenth test they were so adept and well-co-ordinated in their use of the seismoscope that they could close a tunnel, take the soundings and be on their way in under ten-minutes. By late-afternoon they had visited 15 of their target sites.

  “Only five more to go,” said Jenine enthusiastically, consulting her map. “We’ve made brilliant time.”

  The couple were in the shopping concourse of Albron Station. The hurrying river of passengers parted around them and closed up again.

  Ewen checked the seismoscope. “Plenty of memory left - we’ve only used half. So what’s the next station?”

  “Steyning.”

  Ewen’s face clouded with worry. “Jenine I really do think we ought to give Steyning a miss. Their chief of police wasn’t too friendly towards us.”

  “The stations either before or after Steyning are too far apart. If we leave out Steyning there’ll be a large gap in our test sites. If we want to prove something as important as this, our methodology must be above reproach.” She pushed the plan under Ewen’s nose. They had had this argument before. The trouble was that Jenine was right: giving Steyning a miss would create an unscientific gap in the overall results of the survey.

  “I don’t fancy coming face to face with the chief of police again. He might do something that we’ll regret,” Ewen muttered.

  “We’ll be in and out before he finds out that we’ve been back on his patch,” Jenine reasoned. She swung a toolkit from shoulder. “Come on, Ewen. There’s a train in three minutes.”

  Steyning went wrong.

  Horribly wrong.

  If there was a scale of 1-to-10 for just how badly wrong things can go, Steyning would have bent the needle against the 10 stop. Whether the disaster was due to an incorrectly positioned transducer, or a flaw in the rock behind the pedestrian subway tunnel lining that prevented the safe dissipation of the shockwaves was academic because the result was the same.

  It happened after they had completed the test. The lining panel had been replaced so that not even Steyning’s chief of police would be aware that the two troublemakers had returned to his manor making more holes. They shouldered their equipment and were about to reopen the tunnel to the patiently waiting pedestrians when Jenine heard an ominous creaking. She caught Ewen’s arm and looked back anxiously along the subway.

  “Listen!”

  They both heard the strange noise. Suddenly the tunnel’s roof lining panel that they had just replaced bulged down and popped from its clips. They watched it fall to the floor, their eyes round with horror. Adjoining panels did likewise.

  “I think-” Ewen began.

  But he got no further. He was interrupted by a miniature avalanche of fractured rocks that rained down into the tunnel with a thunderous roar and sent clouds of dust billowing around them. For seconds the couple were deafened and blinded. When the dust settled, they were able to see the full extent of the awesome disaster they had unwittingly unleashed. A wall of boulders and smaller rocks completely filled the narrow subway. Even the new chasm that had opened above was filled with fallen debris. Miraculously the lights remained on.

  “Don’t move or say anything,” warned Ewen when they had recovered their wits. “There might be some more loose rocks.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” Jenine answere
d. Beneath the layer of grey dust her face was pale with shock. She went back to assure the anxious pedestrians that nothing was amiss while Ewen cautiously pulled a rock away from the fall without disturbing its neighbours.

  The couple had chosen an unfortunate time of day to blow-up the tunnel. It was the beginning of the evening rush with the result that a queue of frustrated commuters began building up on the other side of the rockfall. The queue backed-up as queues do. It brought the travelators to a stop and extended out of the station entrance into the precinct.

  Thus was the mishap drawn to the attention of the one person in Steyning whom Ewen and Jenine would have preferred to have remained in ignorance.

  “Actually,” Ewen panted, lifting a rock away and dropping it clear, “it’s not as bad as it looks.”

  Jenine opined that Ewen’s comment was bordering on the crass.

  “Yes but I can hear voices.”

  Ewen was right. A babble of excited voices could be heard on the far side of the rockfall. And when Jenine helped him lever one particularly large rock clear, they discovered that they could see faces through the opening.

  Or rather, one face.

  A face that the couple were acquainted with.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the chief of police to the two pairs of wide, anxious, dust-rimmed eyes that were peering at him through the hole.

  “Good evening,” said Ewen, always willing to match politeness with politeness.

  “Do you know one of the problems with police-issue pocket datapads?” asked the police officer.

  Ewen said that he did not.

  “After you’ve keyed-in the symbols for about six pages of charges, they run out of memory.”

  Ewen agreed that it was indeed a great shame.

  8.

  Chief Technician Dom Aster Tarant’s bleak expression was that of an arrogant man who knows that he has an indisputable right to occupy high moral ground without fear of being dislodged. The source of his strength was a list of charges on his desk screen that he read out to the two students standing before him.

  “Carrying out unauthorized experiments on chord-metro property; damage to chord-metro property; obstruction of chord-metro passengers; polluting chord-metro air space; insulting a police officer-”

  “I didn’t insult him,” Jenine interrupted. “I assaulted him.”

  Tarant checked the wording. “All right - assaulting a police off-” He broke off and glared at her. “That’s worse!”

  “I only bit him. He was being over-zealous in his searching of me.”

  “You’d just blown-up his station! He was entitled to search you! You wear baggy overalls like that, several sizes too large, so what do you expect?”

  “We caused a small rockfall,” said Ewen. “It was cleared up in an hour.”

  “That’s not the point. Both of you have brought disgrace to yourselves. I don’t care about that, but I do care about the disgrace you have brought to the Centre. You have besmirched our good name. Because I have assured the chief of police of Steyning that the Centre will be dealing most severely with you, I was able to persuade him to drop these charges against you.”

  “Another imperial court?” Ewen asked, and immediately regretted the question because the chief technician’s expression went from black to thunderous.

  “Not this time, Solant! No - it’ll be a senior disciplinary council hearing for both of you, which I shall convene as and when I see fit - in several months time if I so decide. In the meantime you are both suspended from lectures and all social activities. All the Centre’s facilities will be closed to you. Furthermore, you will be confined to your study apartment. The security guards have been instructed to arrest you on sight should you disobey my edict. Now, perhaps you will tell me why you were carrying out these ludicrous seismic tests all over Arama.”

  Ewen would have spun a yarn, but Jenine decided on an approximation of the truth. She told Tarant about the suspected fissure theory based on the nothingness that the Keltro seismograph indicated was above.

  “Nothingness! Fissures!” Tarant echoed. “Are you telling me now that you were engaged on research? All information we need comes from the Revelation Centre. Are you saying that the word of the GoD is not enough for you?”

  “The information is certain to be in the library,” Jenine answered. “It’s just that we couldn’t find it so we decided to check at first hand.”

  “Nothingness! Fissures!” Tarant repeated. “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Get out before I add blasphemy to these charges.”

  Ewen gave Jenine a sidelong warning glance. Her expression told him to hold his peace. He bent down to pick up the seismoscope.

  “Leave that!” Tarant snapped.

  The thought of leaving the seismoscope behind appalled Ewen. “But its memory contains the results of today’s seismic tests-”

  “I said leave it! It stays in here, in my office until I decide on its disposal.”

  “But-”

  “It stays!” Tarant shouted. “Now get out before I have you thrown out!”

  Jenine took Ewen’s arm to forestall further objections that might aggravate the situation, and led him from the office.

  They took the lift down to the ground floor and left Senate House. It was now dark but students practicing for a coming tournament had illuminated the glass pyramid with portable lights. Jenine looked longingly at the shining prism but said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ewen miserably. “I should never have involved you.”

  “I said I wanted to be with you and I meant it,” said Jenine resolutely.

  They returned to Ewen’s bedroom and sat eating the army-issue biscuits. They had discovered that the coloured packs contained assorted flavours, all delicious, although the discovery was hardly likely to ease their gloom. They talked in disconsolate low tones to avoid waking Calen in the adjoining bedroom.

  “The outsiders have a crude term for the mess we’re in,” said Jenine, chin on hands, staring moodily out of the window across to the glass pyramid. The students had finished their practice session and were dismantling the portable floodlights.

  “What worries me are the seismographs in the “scope,” Ewen muttered. “I wouldn’t put it past Tarant to wipe its memory. He’s vindictive enough, and he’s always wanted to get back at me since that stupid trial.”

  They looked across at the lights of Tarant’s penthouse and office on the top floor of Senate House.

  “Surely he wouldn’t destroy scientific data?” Jenine queried.

  “A rational man wouldn’t,” Ewen replied. “But Tarant is not a rational man…” He thumped the window sill with a mixture of anger and frustration. “If only I could get my hands on that seismoscope.” A thought occurred. “Tarant’s secretary. What do you think the chances are of paying her to transfer its memory to a datapad?”

  “You mean bribe her? You’d have to pay her a lot to make it worthwhile.”

  “Calen’s rich. He’d make me a loan.”

  “Which you’d never be able to repay if we get mindwarped and kicked out. Anyway, we shouldn’t involve Calen in this.”

  The lights went out across the campus and an oppressive silence fell. At midnight a security guard appeared in the lobby of Senate House to lock the doors. The building was secured at night, not so much to deter crime, but to prevent students inflicting practical jokes on their chief technician who was somewhat prone to such activities.

  Finally Tarant’s penthouse lights went out.

  Jenine stiffened as an idea occurred to her. “Ewen, have you still got the cable you used to leave this block when you blew-up the zargon lights?”

  “I did not blow-up the lights, and, yes I have. Why?”

  “I think I could get hold of the data.” Before Ewen had a chance to question her, she left the room and returned with a set of suction pads.

  “This is my training set,” she explained. “They’re much larger than competition pads which makes
their grip more powerful.”

  “More powerful for what?”

  “Climbing up glass, of course.”

  Ewen looked first at the glass-faced Senate House and then at Jenine. The thought of her scaling the building appalled him. The risks were too terrible to even think about. He was learning to recognise that determined jut of her jaw but this time his views had to prevail. “No,” he said shortly.

  “And why not?”

  “Because you’d fall off and damage the paving.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s a stupid idea because the sides of Senate House are vertical and the pyramid isn’t. Because Senate House is the highest building on the campus - at least twice the height of the pyramid.”

  “We practice on a vertical wall in the gym. These pads are good - just one can support my weight, and there’s always two gripping at any time. And it wouldn’t be a race - I could take my time.”

  “You’d be seen.”

  Jenine pointed through the window. “Not if I wore black like you did, and went up the left face. It’s in total darkness.”

  “And there’s another reason, Jenine.”

  “You can’t afford to pay for broken paving slabs?”

  “There is that.” He hesitated. “But the unimportant reason is that love you too much to let you risk such a thing.”

  “We’ll I’m going,” said Jenine softly after they had separated from a kiss. “Help me get kitted up.”

  9.

  Jenine’s feet touched the ground and she gave three sharp pulls on the knotted cable to signal Ewen to haul it up. She melted easily into the shadows because she was wearing a black one-piece stretch bodysuit. It had fitted her well five-years previously as a child; now it was stretched to the point of discomfort. She had forsaken the bandage that bound her breasts at Ewen’s suggestion so that if a guard did spot her, the chances were that she would be mistaken for a female outsider who had somehow managed to enter the Centre, or an employee. Her face had been smeared with grime, and a datapad in a black sleeve hung from her belt. The large suction pads strapped to her knees, and forearms just below elbows, added a note of incongruity to her otherwise decidedly feminine outline.