by Paul Preuss
“I’ve found your saboteur,” I told Karpukhin, shortly after the crew had extracted me from the Lobster. “If you want to know all the facts about him, I suggest you get Joe Watkins in here.”
Which was definitely not something Karpukhin wanted to hear—so I let him sweat a couple of seconds while I enjoyed the fascinating range of expressions rippling across his fat face. Then I gave my report—slightly edited.
I implied, without actually saying so, that the two big squids I’d met were powerful enough to have done all the damage to the grid. I said nothing about the conversation I’d, uh, overseen. That story could only cause incredulity, and besides, I wanted time to think matters over, to tidy up the loose ends. If I could.
This morning we have begun our countermeasures. I am going into the Trinco Deep, carrying the great lights that Lev Shapiro hopes will keep the squids at bay. But how long can this ruse work, if indeed intelligence is dawning in the deep?
I’d barely completed securing the Lobster for today’s dive last night when I got word that yet another alien spacecraft had been sighted, a clone of the first two, accelerating inward from the Mainbelt. This was a garbled tale, which I thought due to wild rumors.
This morning there were more wild rumors. Alien ships coming from Venus, alien ships inbound from Neptune and Uranus! I couldn’t afford to let myself think about all that. I tried to concentrate on the business at hand.
Last night I got Joe to meet me in the hotel bar. I’d intended to swear him to secrecy, but I soon realized I had a different problem: I despaired of ever getting him to stop ranting about world-sized spaceships. When Aliens Collide, etc. I needed desperately to get him back on the Trail of the Giant Squid.
Roughly half a liter of Scotch whisky did the trick…
And Joe was indeed a great help, though he still knows no more of my discoveries than what I told the Russians. He filled me in on what wonderfully developed nervous systems squids possess, and he explained how some of them (the little ones) can change their appearance in a flash, through a sort of instantaneous three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of “chromophores” covering their bodies. Presumably this capability evolved for camouflage, but naturally it has the potential for developing into a communications system—perhaps that’s even inevitable, considering evolution’s inventions.
One thing worried Joe.
“What were they doing around the grid?” he kept asking me plaintively, “They’re cold-blooded invertebrates. You’d expect them to dislike heat as much as they object to light.”
That puzzled Joe, but it doesn’t puzzle me. I think it’s the key to the whole mystery.
Those squids. I’m now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same reason there are humans in the Mainbelt, or on Mercury—for the same reason Forster and his crew went to Amalthea. Pure scientific curiosity. The power grid has drawn the squids from their icy deep home, to investigate a veritable geyser of hot water suddenly welling from the sides of the canyon—a strange and inexplicable phenomenon, and possibly one that menaces their way of life.
And so they have summoned their giant cousin (their servant? their slave?) to bring them a sample for study.
I cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding the sample thus acquired. After all, as recently as a century ago no scientist on Earth would have known what to make of a piece of the thermoelectric grid. But the squids are trying, and that is what matters.
As I dictate this. I’m making the leisurely descent. My thoughts turn to last night’s stroll beneath the ancient battlements of Fort Frederick, watching the moon come up over the Indian Ocean. I can’t help but think of what our own race has been through, reaching for our nearby satellite hardly more than a century ago, after so many years of dreaming and wondering … then spilling out, onto and around the planets and moons and planetoids of the whole solar system. And then to encounter these strange events—awakening aliens from Jupiter!—all of it in such a little time, such a fleeting instant … cosmologically speaking.
So maybe after all I’ll give in and let Joe use these meandering thoughts, this Joycean stream of consciousness-assuming everything goes well, of course!—in this book that he’s taken into his head to badger me into writing. And if everything doesn’t go well…
Hello, Joe, I’m talking to you now. Please edit this for publication any way you see fit, and my apologies to you and Lev for not giving you all the facts before. I’m sure that now you’ll understand why.
Whatever happens, please remember this: they are beautiful creatures, wonderful creatures. Try to come to terms with them if you can.
On the day of Muller’s last dive only one additional, partial sentence was spoken by him, as noted in this memo of that date from Lev Shapiro:
URGENT TRANSMISSION (with I.D. and time code…)
TO: Ministry of Power and Energy Resources, North Continental Treaty Alliance, The Hague
FROM: L. Shapiro, Chief Engineer, Trincomalee Thermoelectric Power Project
Above is the complete transcript of the chip found in the ejection capsule of the Muller submersible, the “Lobster.” Transcription completed this time and date. Remote search for the submersible was interrupted ten minutes ago by the unexplained rupture of the underwater videolink.
Interpretative remarks follow. We are indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins for assistance on several points. Herr Muller’s last intelligible message was directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: “Joe! You were right about Melville! This thing is absolutely gigan…”
28
“One can hardly blame Muller for his confusion,” says Forster. “After all, he’d done his best to concentrate on his underwater work, deliberately ignoring the events unfolding in the heavens. Certainly our surprise was as great as his…”
Angus McNeil was the first of us to come awake and free himself from the medusa’s life-support tendrils. He didn’t know where he was, of course. He’d been asleep since the fall of Mars.
In proper time that was only a few years longer than I had been asleep, but in real time it was more than a billion years. No one was around to smooth his passage back to consciousness, and he was certainly puzzled to discover Klaus Muller’s brightly painted titanium Lobster squatting there in the middle of the medusa’s none-too-large, human-inhabitable space. Still, he managed to take the sight of the big machine in stride. Angus has come close to death more than once, I gather; in the process he seems to have learned to take a great many things in stride.
Angus peered into the Lobster’s round viewport and found Muller peering back, rigid with terror. Muller surely wondered what sort of creature was confronting him; none of us looked much the better for the centuries we had spent under water. Angus spent the next couple of minutes, by his account, convincing the Swiss engineer that it was safe for him to come out.
By then the rest of us had begun to arise, creeping out of the watery drowning chamber into the medusa’s central cell, pale and wet and wrinkled as prunes. For myself, this time I could find no energy, no spark of enthusiasm. I missed having Troy and Redfield there to ease the transition. The others looked as exhausted as I. Poor Marianne was the most pathetic of us all; her sorrows, technically a billion years or so in the past, were still fresh in her memory.
We were confronted by Muller, a blond-brushed, steel-bespectacled, rather plump Swiss burgher, sitting on the rim of his squat and ugly submersible’s open hatch, plainly appalled at our appearance.
“What’s the date?” I asked him, gasping and choking. He stammered out the year, but I interrupted. “No, no, what month? What day?” He told me.
It was the date I wanted to hear. It was the spring equinox. It was the day we had crossed Earth orbit in our own era.
“To the surface!” I cried—which frightened Muller enough for him to slide partway back into his machine. To the others I said, “If you feel as I do, you want to smell Earth’s air and see the Earth’s sky once more—if this should indeed be the
last moment of our reality.” Well, they couldn’t have known what I meant, but they let me have my way…
I went back into the water long enough to speak to our unseen Amalthean companions, who I had sensed controlling the medusa in their language of thumps and whistles.
We came up right at sunset, broke free of the water, and hovered over the bay in midair, offshore. The huge medusa’s appearance caused a sensation—well described in numerous local news reports—but not until morning did the local defense forces organize a helicopter to come out and peer at us close-up. They’d had other things to do during the night, riots and near-panic, political and religious hysteria inspired by the multiple mirrors in the sky…
Through the medusa’s clear canopy we saw spread above us that fantastic sky. The lurid sun had not gone all the way down, and deep night had not yet settled, yet the sky gleamed with globes brighter than stars, trailing flame. And all of them were streaming toward the setting sun.
“Goddess!” I heard myself swear—it was a habit I must have picked up in the Bronze Age, and I was conscious of the odd looks I got from the others—“Where did they all come from?”
“What are they?” Jo Walsh demanded.
“World-ships,” I said, for I had suddenly apprehended the appalling implications of what Thowintha had done.
I remember somebody pronouncing with great vehemence, “The uncertainty principle should hold true only in the microworld!”
And someone else objecting, “We went through the black hole—again and again. Because of that we’ve inflated microscopic uncertainty to the macroscopic scale. Uncertainty manifest and visible.”
Then somebody else asked me (Jo, I think it was), “Were you expecting this, Forster?”
“I am expecting what Troy and Redfield called the state-vector reduction,” I said. “They talked about world-ships—plural. Not thousands of them, millions of them. I think all the possible outcomes of the time loop must be up there.”
“All? What about Nemo? He still has a chance?” That was from Bill Hawkins, who has a sixth sense for the really vexing questions.
“No matter, they’re all on the way to destruction,” said Angus. “They’re all going to annihilate each other.”
“Good for them. What about us?” Jo asked.
Nobody had an answer for her.
What followed that night was one of those half-informed, half-mathematical, half-physical, half-philosophical discussions. (On my part, now only half-remembered—how many halves is that?) At this remove I recall mostly my sloppy sentiment, my love for these people, whom accident had brought to our mutual fate.
Most vividly I remember the black waters below us and the blazing sky above us. I remember Klaus Muller, perched atop his stranded diving machine, his reticence visibly ebbing as he listened raptly to our surreal debate.
Thowintha had gambled and lost, I contended. Sh’he had kidnapped us and taken us back to Venus, meaning to rescue the Adaptationist faction before they could be destroyed by their rivals—an event sh’he must have witnessed in its primordial form. His’er own long memories indicated that we Designates had played a role in the salvation of him’er and his’er kind, but the details were hazy at best. Sh’he believed, or so I argued, that the Traditionalists would simply go on their way, leaving us to make the solar system in our own image.
Things didn’t work out that way. First Nemo and the Traditionalists tried to destroy us—perhaps more than once. Eventually they realized that was impossible, inside the time loop. Then they knew they had to confront us at the origin. And at the same time they realized—or at least Nemo did—that they must exert their efforts to see that the origin was reproduced precisely, exactly.
Bill questioned me sternly. He said he understood well enough why Nemo and his aliens had failed to destroy us—because Thowintha had multiplied us, Xeroxed us, so to speak—but why was it necessary to reproduce the conditions of the origin so perfectly, in order to destroy us once and for all?
Jo came to my aid. “Think of a simple experiment. A photon is projected into a half-silvered mirror. Half the information about the photon’s whereabouts goes through the mirror, half is deflected. Later this information is recombined. Which path did the photon actually take?”
“Both, of course,” said Bill. “After the fact we can say that. But you could have inserted a detector along one of the paths. If you got a photon, it had been taking that path. If you didn’t, it took the other.”
“One could quibble, but close enough,” said Jo. “Now suppose that along these paths someone has inserted more half-silvered mirrors—so that information about the photon’s wherabouts has been multiplied, that its potential paths have been multiplied.”
“All right, but that’s why Nemo can’t eliminate us,” said Bill complacently.
“Suppose he really needs to squash that photon,” Jo persisted. “Where’s he going to intervene?”
“After recombination,” Bill shot back.
“Too late,” I put in. “He’s got a stake in one path, one of the alternatives—it’s his life, his only hope for survival. He needs to prevent the others from ever coming into being.”
“Why not before it hits the mirror?” asked Angus.
Bill turned upon him scornfully. “Fine for a photon. But in our case, any time before the origin would still be inside the time loop. Nemo tries that, there are all those other version of the path before we reach the mirror…” He paused, and we all saw the realization dawn on his face. He had talked himself into it. “The moment of origin,” he said. “The moment when the photon hits the mirror…”
Troy and Redfield—and Thowintha—knew as well as Nemo when the showdown must come. The outcome would be a statistical thing, without guarantees. But they supposed that we might survive. Which gave them a practical problem. Where were we to hide?
The deepest water on Earth is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench; its bottom is 10,915 meters below sea level, only about eleven kilometers down. The world-ship is thirty kilometers in diameter.
One version—the Ur-ship, or one of its later substitutes—was already in orbit around Jupiter. Ours went to hide in the Mainbelt instead, covering itself with a thick layer of worthless regolith. Still, its size was considerable; it was among the first asteroids discovered with a primitive telescope. In our era that asteroid has withstood two prospecting expeditions—and both times has managed to pass as worthless, for commercial purposes.
There Thowintha and his myriad companions settled to sleep once again. Here in the Indian Ocean—the Earth’s emptiest quarter—we in the medusa settled into a similar sleep. We’d made sure to make our arrangements in a place and time Nemo was unlikely to interrupt us. We had about 2, 000 years to wait, to see how it all came out… Our Amalthean crew woke first.
As I have stressed, Amaltheans live and breathe communication—it may even be said that these magnificent intelligences become somewhat rattled in the absence of their companions. While we humans still slept in the peace of utter unconsciousness, the two crewmembers went exploring. They were soon attracted to the Trincomalee power project’s heat-producing grid. And Klaus Muller’s report gives some inkling of what happened next…
A few days later, when our tentacled friends encountered Muller’s submersible, they experienced an emotion akin to panic. Aboard the medusa we humans were still soundly sleeping, helpless. Would other humans bring a fleet of underwater vessels to seek out and attack us? The Amaltheans worried that they might have betrayed their trust, which was to preserve us until the moment of state-vector reduction.
Hastily they summoned the medusa to preempt Muller, and on his next dive they were waiting to seize him and his Lobster. From his last words on the commlink we know he mistook the thing that was attacking him (surely it was hideous in his eyes!) for a giant squid. Poor Muller only had time enough to eject an emergency communications capsule before his machine was captured…
But at last our attempt to
understand our predicament ground to a halt. Shining streaks of light smeared the star-spangled sky above us. Like comets, they all converged upon the sun, at last invisible below the palm-fringed western horizon.
Marianne spoke for the first time, a sad, quiet whisper in the night. “When will we know that we are dead?” she asked.
I turned to Klaus Muller, who had been peering at us from the top of his Lobster all the while as if we were the most extraordinary examples he’d yet seen of exotic undersea life. In that moment my heart went out to him—for although I am not noted for my psychological sophistication, I could recognize the effort he was making to hold onto his sanity.
“What time is it?” I demanded. He was the only one among us who would know. He looked at his chronometer and told me the time, to the second. “We are not dead,” I said to Marianne. “The issue seems to have been decided in our favor.”
“Well live?” she asked.
“You mean this is the one reality?” Angus demanded.
“I mean we’ll never know. We will all have died natural deaths by the time those multiple versions of reality reach Nemesis.”
They all thought about that for several seconds. Only Angus and Jo were quick enough to catch me out, I think, for when Hawkins started to argue again—not from conviction, but from pure cussedness—Angus cut him off. “I suggest that we spruce up and find ourselves a drink.”
In all the centuries in which I’ve lived—if only for a few days—I’ve rarely turned down a well-made product of fermentation or distillation. But this time I let Angus and Jo and Bill and Marianne go ashore without me; I was not yet ready to join them in their search for libations, or their encounters with customs officers. And apparently Klaus Muller shared my reticence.
“I’ve something to tell you, Professor,” he said, when the others had gone.
