“If you’re still following.”
“I’m still behind you, but I’m darned if I know why. I’ve followed you into some crazy situations before, but this has the lot beaten.”
They moved on, the roar of the trolley casters echoing and reverberating around them and occasionally stopping as Fritz eased the little wheels over a flange gap.
“Just entering pipe nineteen,” said Van Noon finally. “If they provided as many as we did them there’s only one to go.”
“See anything yet?”
“Not an atom.”
“I was just thinking, Fritz. It’d be a neat trick if they’d connected an infinity of pipes together. We could go on crawling through here till Judgment Day.”
“Good point, Jacko. We’ll reconsider the position when we get to the end of number twenty.”
Again the trolley roared and stopped.
“Just entering pipe twenty,” said Van Noon.
“Let’s get it over with,” said Jacko. “I feel like a godevil working overtime.”
“right. This is it!”
The trolley was moving slowly now, with Fritz concentrating on every centimetre of its progress, using the feel of the iron instead of eyes. There was no way to measure distance in the darkness. The only way was to crawl and to hope that one remembered the feeling of crawling a length of pipe. Then a sudden cessation of noise, with the echoes slowly sinking around them.
“End of pipe,” said Van Noon. “But there’s no resistance. The trolley is half way out of the end but I still can’t see a thing. I’m going to let the trolley go and see what happens.”
There was a brief scrape of metal on metal, and the thump of something on the pipe.
“It fell down,” said Van Noon, “but not very far. I can still feel it with my hand. And something else . . . There’s no contra-momentum out here. I can move quite freely. It isn’t even very cold. It must mean we’re well inside the wall of the Dark. I wonder if the torch will work.”
The torch did work. In the darkness the light touched the interior of the pipe with an intensity that was momentarily dazzling. Projected outwards, the beam was clearly visible but it contacted nothing that reflected except the wet, brown stones of the earth, and the radiation trolley fallen on its side. Ostensibly they were looking into night, bare and empty, but Fritz was not convinced.
“This isn’t darkness,” said Van Noon. “It’s more like veils of darkness . . . thin layers of contra-light. See how the torch beam falls off in discrete quanta. I’m going out there, Jacko, to see if I can make head or tail of this. You stay by the pipe with a torch ready to guide me back. I’d very much like to find out who or what it was that put ten pipes on the end of ours.”
“And I’m going to wish you luck,” Jacko said. “I’m not at all sure I want to know.”
Van Noon dropped to the ground. The soil underfoot was an obvious continuation of the old town terrain. His torch illuminated the stony earth for many metres in front of him, but it was useless when directed horizontally in any direction because of the apparent lack of anything to reflect the light.
But he was right in his observation that the intensity of the light was stepped-down by curtaining veils of something. As he approached a veil he could see a distinct drop in the brightness of the beam as it was intercepted by something dark and nebulous. He reached the veil and touched it, curiously. His fingers encountered nothing, and he walked through it without sensation. Looking back, he was glad still to be able to see the light from Jacko’s torch, but he knew that if he passed through many veils even that would be lost to him.
But the situation changed without warning. The fifth veil was not insubstantial at all. It was a film of something like dark, thin-blown glass, and he shattered it with his torch because he had not known of its solidity. And as it shattered, light from beyond spilled out through the broken edges and he had the briefest glimpse of the scene of gold-hazed wonder . . . and then the air exploded in his face.
And even the explosion was unreal. The blast caught him not from in front but from behind and above, moving towards the explosion rather than from it. It tumbled him forward and pinned his body to the ground with a great pressure. Desperately he fought to raise his neck and shoulders for a further glimpse of the creatures who lived in their sanctuary deep inside the hollow Dark. He wanted a better look at the godlike machines they controlled, now rising high like gossamer and congregating in the golden light as they swept magnificently upwards almost faster than the eye could follow. But a sheet of flame crackled and tore across the vastness of the area and whipped high in an angry, explosive tide.
A shockfront of pressure tore him from the ground, then dropped him cruelly. Despite the hurt he fought to retain consciousness and turn and watch the exodus of the gods. But the forces acting on him were too great. Instead he was swamped by darkness.
His next impression was that of Courtney’s face and the sense of lapsed hours. He felt bruised and shaken, but not seriously hurt. He was lying in the open, and the Ithican sky above was broadly trailed with the colours of the sunset.
Courtney came up and put a folded coat beneath his head and a blanket over his body.
“Take it easy, Fritz. There’s a doctor on his way.”
Van Noon smiled wanly. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. “Is this where the Dark was, or did you get me out.”
Courtney sat down beside him. “The Dark’s gone, Fritz. I don’t know what you did, but you certainly made a good job of it. The whole darn thing imploded. It was a fantastic sight. The Dark and the Pen drew up together, then spiralized like a whirlwind. There was a blast which broke every window in New Bethlem . . . and then the whole complex just disappeared.”
“I know what did it,” said Van Noon. “Our atmosphere reacted with theirs with a sort of mutual destructiveness. It was the total reaction of mass with mass – complete consumption of both and no by-product. It was our tunnel let the air through, and I broke the last seal by accident. And once the reaction started, nothing could stop it.”
“So it was contra-terrene!” said Courtney.
“Deep inside, yes. And I’d guess that the purpose of the Dark was to act as a form of barrier against the contra world outside – an insulator separating the opposed atomic conditions. They must have tried to maintain it against penetration by every trick they knew. But what damned them was a simple slip of logic. They stopped a hollow object with a hollow object . . . and forgot the hole inside. But even so, we were lucky to get through.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes,” said Fritz. “We were operating on the wrong principle. There was no detection, analysis, synthesis reaction involved. There didn’t need to be, not the way they did it.”
“I don’t follow, Fritz.”
“I missed the point myself at first, but there’s only one logical answer to the detection and negation of any phenomena applied anywhere at any time . . . They did it with mirrors.”
“Mirrors?”
“Yes. Not ordinary mirrors, of course, but using a reflecting principle capable of producing the exact and true physical inverse of whatever comes into its field – a mirror that works not only with light but over the entire region of physical and force phenomena, including matter itself.”
“My God!” said Courtney. “It’s a fascinating concept.”
“I’d give anything to know the mechanics of it,” said Van Noon. “The reflector wasn’t a simple plane, it was a three-dimensional cavity about ninety metres deep between the inner and outer walls. And somehow in that space were reproduced contra-physical objects rather than mere images. And in our innocence we had the temerity to bore right through the ‘glass’ to the back.”
“That’s where you have me puzzled by this mirror hypothesis, Fritz. It doesn’t seem to fit the facts. Your breakthrough was dependent on the assumed detection–analysis–synthesis trinity, and it worked. But the theory assumed a delay time was inherent. But a mirror has no
time-lag. Its returned image is instantaneous.”
“That’s not true,” objected Van Noon. “The image returned by a mirror is never instantaneous. Light travels from the object to the glass at a finite velocity, and through the glass at a different but also finite velocity. So the image returned to the object is always delayed in time by just twice the time it takes light to reach the reflector. We were lucky in that in their contra mirror the effect was even more pronounced for the type of phenomenon in which we were interested.”
Courtney absorbed this in silence for a moment or two. Then: “What put you on to the idea, Fritz?”
“Primarily your point about their power output having to match the total power input from all sources. It seemed improbable they would have chosen such a dynamic and wasteful method of maintaining a long-term defence. But a reflection principle has no such disadvantage. A mirror returns only when it receives. It needs no power to return the image. And when I got into the cavity and found nothing there but the image-iron pipes by which we’d just arrived, I knew that reflection was the only answer. But like a damn fool I went and blundered through the ‘silvering’ on the back of this mirror.”
He leaned back momentarily and closed his eyes, trying to recapture an image in his own head. “What happened to them, Maxwell? Did they get away?”
Courtney turned his head to look at the sunset.
“No. They didn’t make it, Fritz. They reached the stratosphere in those machines of theirs, but then they exploded. Thank God the power release was too high to do much damage!”
“It’s a pity,” said Fritz. “I’d sooner have got to know them than have destroyed them. We could have learnt an awful lot from people who could build mirrors like that.”
“Had they been inclined to teach,” said Courtney, “but in two hundred years they never attempted even to make a contact. I think that they were so far ahead of us that we were merely as ants to them.”
Van Noon sat up painfully and looked around. “By the way, what happened to Jacko?”
“He’s a little bruised and dazed, but nothing serious. Apparently the implosive blast shot him out of the pipe like a cork out of a bottle. He swears you did it on purpose.”
“I saw them go,” said Van Noon, “and they were like golden gods flying back to Olympus. I would never have done a thing like that on purpose. Do you suppose we’ll ever know why they were here?”
“I doubt it,” said Courtney. “And even if they’d tried to tell us, I doubt our capacity to have understood. Try explaining the uses and construction of a Dewar flask to an ant – and see who gets tired first.”
Inanimate Objection
H. Chandler Elliott
I do like stories that take the simplest of ideas and then develop it to the ultimate extreme. That’s what happens here. Harry Chandler Elliott (1907–78) is another of those authors now pretty much forgotten. He was a Canadian physicist who worked in the US. He wrote one novel, Reprieve from Paradise (1955) and a handful of short stories in the mid-to-late fifties, of which this was his first, and then stopped.
Dr Carl Wahl (intern) skimmed over the highlights of the Worksheet, Mental Status, as it strove presumptuously to fix the outlines of a human personality – and an off-beat one at that:
PATIENT’S NAME: (Maj.) Angus G. Burnside.
AGE: 57. DOCTOR: Wm. Svindorff, Dr Matthew Loftus in attendance.
GENERAL HISTORY: Army Engineers, specialist electric communications. Retired small Catskill estate 1949. No record of major trauma or disease. KIN: Married, Ruth Elvira, née Barker, aged 35, she says. Relationship amicable but somewhat distant.
ATTITUDE: Quiet, cooperative. Personal habits meticulous. Permitted unlimited access to books and electronic materials. Coherent outside limits of his mania.
EMOTIONAL REACTION, AFFECT: Calm, amused at his own situation. NATURE OF ABERRATION: Believes inanimate objects display active hostility. This is not directed at himself personally. In fact, he believes he can circumvent it more readily than most, but expresses concern for safety of the human race. Discusses this belief with scholarship and detachment. EXAMPLES: Said to nurse (Miss Clements): “Your apron-bow is waiting to pick something off that tray.” Said to me (Loftus): “I’d fix that loose heel if I were you. If it hasn’t thrown you yet, it’s just waiting for an opportunity to really break your neck.”
“Well, hell!” said Dr Carl Wahl. “That’s just a picturesque way of expressing commonplace facts. He sees something that’s liable to cause an accident, and personifies it. Why put a mild eccentric like that in here, when we can’t accommodate urgent cases?”
Dr Matthew Loftus (resident) grimaced: “Since you ask, I’ll agree it stinks. Of course, those excerpts don’t give you any real idea. He’s as psychotic as a jay-bird, no doubt at all. He conducts himself entirely according to this fixation. And he’s got it all worked out in theory, too; damnedest stuff you ever heard, plausible as only a complete psychotic can be – half convinces you, till you get away from his spell and have a chance to think. But I agree . . . he certainly shouldn’t be here.”
Wahl put the Worksheet on Matt Loftus’s desk, looking interested. “You would draw the only ripsnorter with big ideas in this grab-bag of catatonics and dements.”
“Not to mention dipsos and plain stumblebums,” Matt Loftus grinned. “And that old lady who makes immoral paper dolls.” He looked at the sheet almost fondly. “A little old-fashioned, poetic madness is rather refreshing, isn’t it? And Angus Burnside is a gentleman and scholar of some old school, and a most engaging conversationalist. I frequent his lair considerably more than is strictly required. Tell you what, Carl . . . I’ll take you on as consultant, if you’re interested. You could get next to him on music; he’s got a terrific audio system up there, and he actually plays it as much as he tinkers with it. Best company in the institute.”
“That,” said Carl Wahl, “is a deal.”
That afternoon, after a non-institutional knock and a polite summons from within, the two men entered the Major’s room. Large by local standards, it could have been a good hotel-room-with-bath, except for the barred windows and general starkness. The chintzy curtains, cheery rugs, and optimistic pictures usually found in high-class mental wards were absent, replaced with dialed cabinets, a long shelf of records and tape spools, and an electrician’s workbench of impressive resources.
The occupant, rising from the bench to face his visitors, would have dominated a much more distracting environment – say, an amphibious retreat under enemy fire. He was a lean, brown man; his hair was silver but thick; his white mustache was clipped with extreme precision. His gray eyes were merry and kind, however: in that amphibious debacle, he would be the type to rescue men physically by diving in, or mentally with acrid jests. Carl’s practiced glance could note none of the little tics or rigidities that often betray underlying dislocation of nerves or mind.
The Major immediately put everybody on terms of informal equality by displaying the wireless relay he was arranging between his phonograph amplifier and speaker. Then, with the smartness of a precision-drill squad, he clicked back into racks and drawers the few tools and bits of material in use, and turned to Carl with disconcerting candor: “I suppose you want to hear my theory – or mania? Fine! Make yourselves comfortable.”
Matt draped himself on the bed and Carl took an armchair. The two were a complete contrast: Matt, behind a youthful face and mild voice, kept in ambush a mind as incisive as an electric scalpel; Carl, raw-boned and lank-haired, was a very reliable citizen, but he harbored a quiet mysticism that was often invaluable in establishing rapport with the mentally unconventional.
“I’ll ask you,” the Major began, “to consider my thesis as dispassionately as our relative positions will allow. For a start, perhaps you’ll admit that any notion, however apparently fantastic, that has been held by many ages and cultures is worth scientific investigation, if only to explain it away.”
They nodded.
�
�Good,” said the Major. “Now, few notions have been so universally held as the one I shall discuss: that what we call inanimate objects have a will of their own. The ancients endowed them with spirits – lares, oreads and so on. Medieval alchemists described an elaborate, if largely arbitrary, system of sympathies and antipathies – not personification, but something far subtler. Modern science simply shrugs: fantasies of dawning reason. An opinion without proof, I submit. In the last war our fliers, the flower of the mechanical age, devised the Gremlins – whole fun and half earnest – for they sensed something more than a chance mechanical failure . . . some Thing malicious and aggressive.”
Carl was attentively analyzing manner as well as matter: The Major’s logic was certainly off the gold standard – the case built on random gleanings, the disregard for alternative possibilities. Yet certain psychotic qualities were lacking: the grandiose seriousness, the touchiness, the air of knockdown argument. And, an inner mentor reminded, the ability to select significant detail was often the trademark of genius: “great wits are oft to madness near allied . . .”
“Of course,” the Major continued, “the idea flouts sacred axioms. But, after all . . . sacred? Science is study of evidence, not recitation of a creed. And aren’t the axioms being badly strained? ‘If you knew all the physical factors, you could explain everything.’ Safe enough, since you never will know them. But your axioms work to a high approximation in certain carefully selected and managed cases, so you reject all other explanations for everything, in the name of a spurious unity.”
So he did consider alternatives, Carl thought. Aloud, he asked, “What evidence exists for any other explanations?”
“Ha! That’s exactly my ‘mania’. By the theory of probability, you get a straight flush in every-so-many poker hands. But what if straight flushes crop up all over?”
Matt objected: “We’ve already discussed how easily you can prove dreams are prophetic if you record the ones that turn out and disregard the rest, and so on.”
The Mammoth Book Of Science Fiction Page 36
