Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

  He put on his hat, and went out through the door of the orderly room into a yard of unvigorous grass. Worsaw was sitting on the steps of the brick barracks building, smoking. The captain addressed him without thinking:

  "Sergeant!"

  Worsaw rose and stood to attention smartly. "Sir!"

  "That is to say -- " (Trying to make the blunder seem a deliberate cruelty, and not -- which was inadmissible -- an error.) " -- Private Worsaw. Inform the men that they are to be prepared to make a jump in the morning at eight hundred hours."

  How quickly the clouds of resentment could overcast the man's pale eyes. But in an even tone Worsaw replied, "Yes, sir."

  "And shine those shoes, Private. They're a disgrace to this company."

  "Yes, sir ."

  "You're in the Army now, Private. Don't you forget it."

  "No, sir ."

  As though , the captain thought wryly as he walked away, he had any choice. Poor devil. As though he could forget it. As though any of us could.

  "This will be your first jump, won't it, Captain?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Colonel Ives laid a forefinger on the soft folds of his chin. "Let me caution you against expecting much, then. It will be no different there than it is here at Camp Jackson. You breathe the same air, see the same dome overhead, drink the same water, live in the same buildings, with the same men."

  "Yes -- so I've been told. But even so, it's hard to believe."

  "There are some differences. For instance, you can't drive in to D.C. on the week ends. And there are fewer officers. It can become very boring."

  "You wouldn't be able to tell me, I suppose, to whom I'll be reporting?"

  Colonel Ives shook his head aggrievedly. "I don't know myself. Security around the Womb is absolute. It would be easier to break into heaven, or into Fort Knox. You'll receive your final instructions tomorrow, just before you go into the Womb, but not from me. I only work here."

  Then why, the captain wondered, did you have me come to see you?

  The colonel was not long in answering the unasked question: "I heard about the little to-do you had this morning with the men."

  "Yes -- with Sergeant Worsaw."

  "Ah -- then you mean to say his rank has been restored already?"

  "No. I'm afraid I was only speaking loosely."

  "A shame that it had to happen. Warsaw is a good man, an absolutely topnotch technician. The men respect him -- even the, um, colored boys. You're not a Southerner yourself, are you, Captain?"

  "No, sir."

  "Didn't think so. We Southerners are sometimes hard to explain to other folks. Take Worsaw now -- a good man, but he does have a stubborn streak, and when he takes a notion into his head -- " Colonel Ives clucked with dismay. "But a good man -- we can't let ourselves forget that."

  Colonel Ives waited until the captain had agreed to this last statement.

  "Of course these things will happen. They're inevitable when you're taking over a new command. I remember, in my own case -- did I tell you that I was once at the head of "A" Company myself? Yes, indeed! I had a little trouble with that fellow too. But I smoothed it over, and soon we were all working together like clockwork. Of course it was easier for me than it will be for you. I hadn't gone so far as to strip him of rank. That was a very strong gesture, Captain. I imagine you must have regretted it since?"

  "No, sir. I was convinced at the time, and still am, that he merited it -- amply."

  "Of course, of course. But we must remember the Golden Rule, eh? 'Live and let live.' The Army is a team, and we've all got to pull together. You can't do your work without Worsaw, Captain, and I can't do my work without you. We can't let prejudice -- " Colonel Ives paused to smile, " -- or temper affect our judgment. Mutual co-operation: that's the Army way. You co-operate with Worsaw, I co-operate with you."

  The captain's attitude throughout this speech had been one of almost Egyptian stillness. Now there was a long silence while Colonel Ives waited, bobbing his head up and down into his chins, for the captain to agree with him.

  "Is that all, sir?" the captain asked.

  "Now isn't that just like a Northerner? Always in a rush to be off somewhere else. Well, don't let me slow you down, Captain. But if I might offer a word of advice -- though it's none of my business -- "

  "By all means, Colonel."

  "I'd restore Worsaw's rank by the end of the week. I'm sure that will have been punishment enough for what he did. I seem to recall, in my day, that a little poaching wasn't unheard of after rifle drill. Nothing official, of course, but then everything isn't always done in official ways, Captain. If you take my meaning."

  "I'll consider your recommendation, sir."

  "Do! Do! Good night, Captain -- and bon voyage."

  Outside, the captain wandered about for some time to no apparent purpose. Perhaps he was considering the colonel's suggestion; more probably he was only considering the colonel. His wanderings brought him to the center of the unlighted parade grounds

  He looked about him, scanning the sky -- forgetting, since he had lived so many years beneath it, that this was not the real sky but a simulation; for Camp Jackson, Virginia, was nestled under the western edge of the Washington D.C. Dome. The dome was studded with millions of subminiaturized photoelectric cells which read the positions of the revolving stars and reduplicated their shifting pattern on the underside of its immense canopy.

  There, low in the East, in the constellation of Taurus, was Mars -- the red planet, portent of war. It was very strange; it almost exceeded belief that in less than twelve hours he, Captain Nathan Hansard of "A" Artillery Company of the Camp Jackson/Mars Command Post, would be standing with his feet firmly planted upon that speck of reddish light.

  TWO

  THE STEEL WOMB

  It measured, on the outside, 14.14' x 14.14' x 10.00', so that an observer regarding it from the floor of the hall in which it stood would see each face of it as a golden rectangle. The walls were two feet thick, of solid chrome-vanadium steel, covered with banks and boards of winking colored lights. The play of these lights, itself an imposing spectacle, was accompanied by nervous cracklings and humming sounds vaguely suggestive of electricity, or at least of Science.

  There was a single opening to this sanctum -- a portal some four feet in diameter set into the center of one of the golden rectangles, like the door of a bank vault. Even when this portal was open it was not possible for onlookers to glimpse the awesome central chamber itself, for a mobile steel antechamber would hide it from view at such times. No one but the men who had made the jump -- the priests, as it were, of this mystery -- had ever seen what it was like inside the Steel Womb.

  And it was all fakery, mere public relations and stagecraft. The jump to Mars could have been made with the equivalent of four tin cans full of electronic hardware and a power source no greater than would have been available from a wall socket. The lights winked only for the benefit of the photographers from Life ; the air hummed so that visiting Congressmen might be persuaded that the nation was getting its money's worth. The whole set had been designed not by any engineer but by Emily Golden, who had also done the sets a decade before for Kubrick's Brave New World .

  Superfluous it might be, but it was no less daunting for all that. Hansard was given ample time to savor the spectacle. Once "A" Company had arrived at the outer, outer gate of the security complex of which the transmitter was the navel stone, there had been a continuous sorting through of passes and authorizations; there had been searches, identity checks, telephone confirmations -- every imaginable kind of appetizer.

  It was an hour before they reached the heart of the labyrinth, the hall that housed the Holy of Holies, and it was another hour before each man had been cleared for the jump. The hall they waited in was about as big as a small-town high-school auditorium. The walls were bare, unpainted concrete, the better to focus all eyes upon that magnificent Christmas tree at the center of the room. Large as it was, however, the ha
ll seemed crowded now.

  There were guards everywhere. There were guards before the portal of the Womb, a dozen at least; there were guards at the doubly-locked door that led out of the hall; there were guards all around the Christmas tree, like so many khaki-wrapped presents, and there were guards, seemingly, to guard the presents. There was a whole cordon of guards around the men of "A" Company, and there were also guards behind the glass partitions half-way up the walls of the hall.

  It was there, in the booths behind those windows, that the technicians adjusted the multitude of dials that made the Christmas tree glow and bubble, and operated the single toggle switch that could send the contents of the transmitter from Earth to Mars in literally no time at all.

  The lights were reaching their apotheosis, and the countdown had already begun for the opening of the portal (countdowns being the very stuff of drama), when the door that led into the hall opened and a two-star general under heavy guard entered and approached Hansard. Hansard recognized him from his photograph as General Foss, the chief of all Mars operations.

  After the formalities of introduction and identification, General Foss explained his purpose succinctly: "You are to present this attaché case, containing a Priority-A letter, to the commanding officer, General Pittmann, immediately upon arrival. You will witness him remove the letter from the case."

  "General Pittmann -- the C.O.!"

  General Foss made no further explanations; none were necessary, and he did not seem disposed to practice conversation for its own sake.

  Hansard was embarrassed at his outburst, but he was nonetheless pleased to be enlightened. That General Pittmann was now heading the Mars Command Post explained the otherwise inexplicable fact of Hansard's transfer from the Pentagon to Camp Jackson. It was not Hansard who was being transferred so much as Pittmann; the General's aide had simply been swept up in his wake.

  They might have told me, Hansard thought, though it did not surprise him that they had not. It would not have been the Army way.

  Already the first squad of eight men, concealed in the belly of the mobile antechamber as in some very streamlined Trojan horse, were approaching the portal of the transmitter. The antechamber locked magnetically into place, and there was a pause while the portal opened and the eight men, all unseen, entered the Womb. Then the antechamber moved back, revealing only the closed portal.

  The multitude of lights ornamenting the surface of the transmitter now darkened, with the exception of a single green globe above the portal which indicated that the eight men were still present within. The hall had grown hushed. Even the guards, themselves a part of the stagecraft, regarded this moment of the mystery with reverence.

  The green light turned to red: the men were on Mars.

  The Christmas tree lit up again, and the process was repeated three more times for three more squads of men. Nine, ten, even a dozen men might have occupied the inner chamber without discomfort, but there was a regulation to the effect that eight was to be the maximum number of men to be allowed in the manmitter at any one time. No one knew why such a regulation had been made, but there it was. It was now a part of the rites surrounding the mystery, and had to be observed. It was the Army way.

  After the four squads had made the jump, there remained a single soldier -- a Negro private whose name Hansard was uncertain of (he was either Young or Pearsall) -- and Hansard himself. A warrant officer informed Hansard that he had the option of making the jump with this soldier, or going through alone afterward.

  "I'll go now." It was more comfortable, in a way, to have company.

  He tucked the attaché case under his arm and climbed up the ladder and into the antechamber. The private followed. They sat upon a narrow ledge and waited while the Trojan horse rolled slowly and smoothly toward the portal of the manmitter.

  "Made many jumps, Private?"

  "No, sir. This is the first. I'm the only one in the company that hasn't been there before."

  "Not the only one, Private. It's my first jump too."

  The antechamber locked against the steel wall of the transmitter, and the portal opened inward with a discreet click. Crouching, Hansard and the private entered. The door closed behind them.

  Here there were no special effects; neither rumblings nor flashing lights. The noise in his ears was the pulse of his own blood. The feeling in his stomach was a cramped muscle. As he had done in the practice session, he stared intently at the sign stencilled with white paint on the wall of the vault:

  CAMP JACKSON/EARTH MATTER TRANSMITTER

  Then, in an instant, or rather in no time at all, the sign had changed. Now it read:

  CAMP JACKSON/MARS MATTER TRANSMITTER

  It was as simple as that.

  The instantaneous transmission of matter, the most important innovation in the history of transportation since the wheel, was the invention of a single man, Dr. Bernard Xavier Panofsky. Born in Poland in 1929, Panofsky spent his youth and early adolescence in a Nazi labor camp where his childhood genius first manifested itself in a series of highly ingenious -- and successful -- escape plans. Upon being liberated, so the story goes, he immediately applied himself to the formal study of mathematics and found to his chagrin that he had, independently and all ignorantly, reinvented that branch of mathematics known as analysis situs, or topology.

  In the late sixties, and already a middle-aged man, Panofsky masterminded his final escape plan: He and three confederates were the last men known to have got over the Berlin Wall. Within a year he had obtained an associate professorship in mathematics at a Catholic university in Washington D.C. By 1970 topology was an unfashionable field; even Game Theory, after a long heyday, was losing favor to the newer science of Irrationality.

  In consequence, though Panofsky was one of the world's foremost topologists, the research grant that he received was trifling. In all his work, he never used a computer and never employed more than a single assistant, and even in building the pilot model of the transmitter he spent only $18,560. There wasn't a mathematician in the country who didn't agree that Panofsky's example had set the prestige of their science back fifty years.

  It is an almost invariable rule that the great mathematicians have done their most original work in their youth, and Panofsky had been no exception. The theoretical basis of the transmitter had been laid as long ago as 1943, when in fashioning his own topological axioms, the fourteen-year-old prisoner naďvely evolved certain features discordant with the classical theories -- chiefly the principle that became known as the Paradox of the Exploding Klein Bottle. It was to be the work of his next forty years to try to resolve these discrepancies; then, this proving impossible, to exploit them.

  The first transmission was made on Christmas Day of 1983, when Panofsky transported a small silver crucifix (weight: 7.4 grams) from his laboratory on the campus to his home seven blocks away. Because of the circumstances surrounding this event, Panofsky's achievement was not given serious attention by the scientific community for almost a year. It did not help that the press insisted on speaking of the transmission as a "miracle," or that a shrewd New York entrepreneur, Max Brede (pronounced Brady), was selling replicas (in plated nickel) of the Miraculous Hopping Cross within weeks of the first newspaper stories.

  But of course it was a fact, not a miracle, and facts can be verified. Quickly enough Panofsky's invention was taken seriously -- and taken away. The Army, under the Emergency Allocation of Resources Act (rather hastily drawn up by Congress for the occasion) had appropriated the transmitter, despite all that Panofsky and his sponsors (which now included not only his university, but General Motors and Ford-Chrysler as well) could do. Since that time Panofsky found himself once again a prisoner, for it was obviously contrary to the nation's best interests that the mind that harbored such strategic secrets should experience all the dangers of freedom.

  Like the President, and ten or twelve other "most valuable" men, Panofsky lived virtually under house arrest. To be sure, it was the most elegan
t of houses, having been specially constructed for him on a site facing the university campus. But the gilt of the cage did little to cheer the prisoner within, whose singular (and in advertent) manner of escaping from these circumstances we shall have opportunity to consider later in this history.

  The invention suffered a fate similar to the inventor's. The transmitters, as we have already seen, were even more fastly guarded than he, and were used almost exclusively for defense purposes (though the State Department had managed to have its chief embassies provided with small, one-man models), to the despair of Panofsky and a minority of editorialists -- both right and left -- and to the secret relief of every major element of the economy. Understandably, the business community dreaded to think what chaos would result from the widespread use of a mode of transportation that was instantaneous, weighed (in the final improved model) a mere 49-1/2 ounces, and consumed virtually no power.