"Precisely what kind of sub-atomic particles does the cloud chamber reveal, Mark?"
"Protons, electrons, positrons—any charged particle, as I recall. I still don't see what this has to do with—"
"Where do these charged particles come from?"
"Well, from various sources. The cloud chamber was probably used first to study cosmic rays—"
"Then the particles come from outside the chamber?" Berina prompted.
"Why, yes, certainly. Almost always. The media in a cloud chamber might occasionally produce a spontaneous fission, but generally an event is set off by a particle from outside. Of course, that particle might strike a particle within the chamber and produce a burst of secondary tracks."
"Good. Now, let's suppose the intruding particle were an entire atom of contramatter. What would happen then?"
Mark laughed. "I'm not sure, since it's never been done, to my knowledge. I know of no one who has put together a contra-atom, much less kept it together long enough to get it into a cloud chamber. But I'd like to see it done. The results should be spectacular."
"All right," Berina said grimly. "Consider our universe a vast cloud chamber, Mark. And consider your Neg invader an atom of contramatter. Not merely a charged particle, but a wholly alien intruder with the capability of initiating destructive chains of events that no native particle could set off. Do you see the analogy?"
Slowly he nodded. "I see it to a degree, although your analogy seems a bit stretched. An ego-field, Neg or normal, is not material, and that limits its capabilities right off."
"On the contrary, because of that its capabilities are unlimited," Berina retorted. "A man-sized chunk of contramatter could at most wipe out one planet, and that would be the end of it. But thought can control matter, can conquer it, and theoretically can even create and destroy it. Do you begin to see the implications?"
"I suppose so," Mark shrugged, feeling both amused and irritated by Berina's lecturing. "But I have no idea what I'm supposed to do about it."
"Fight," she responded. "Don't let that Neg get control over you. Keep the upper hand at all times."
"Does that mean I give up sleeping?" he snorted.
"Every time I wake up my Neg is aching me."
Berina frowned. "I'm not sure sleep has anything to do with it. In any event, you can't fight by staying constantly awake. That would weaken your power to resist. I can't really tell you how to wage your battle. You'll have to learn from experience. Now, would you care for a swim?" That offer, Keaflyn guessed, meant Berina was through talking. "I wouldn't mind," he said.
"Then come on in." She dived from her sitting position and began stroking away toward the far side of the pool. Keaflyn stripped and dived after her.
He hit the water with the mildly pleasant shock he had expected, but what followed was a sensation totally new and delightful. The swirling warm-and-cool parawaters swept in unpredictable courses along his body, a rapid alternation of snuggle-and-tingle that made him yell with pure joy. The pleasure-impress Smath had installed was submerged in and indistinguishable from the ecstasy that flooded his senses.
He wriggled, twisted, dived to the bottom, came up, rapidly ran the gamut of swimming strokes, dived again to examine the stirring paddles that kept the parawaters from separating into layers, and finally swam on out to Berina with a racing crawlstroke.
"You rich kids sure know how to live!" he gurgled and gasped.
"When you're rich enough, luxuries become necessities," she returned with a smile. "How's the ache?"
He had to search his physical sensations for a moment before finding the answer. "Damned if it isn't still there!" he laughed. "My poor, stubborn Neg! Do you suppose the Neg authorities pick pleasure-loving masochist Negs for such assignments?"
"Could be, though if they have been forced to parallel our history, they should all be sane pain-lovers by now."
"Well, I'm going to show him no mercy! I'm going to swim and swim and swim!"
"And sink!" laughed Berina, leaping forward with unexpected speed and shoving him under.
He came up sputtering and made a dive for her. She twisted aside and he missed, but a couple of lunges brought him within grabbing distance of a flailing ankle. He dragged her to the bottom before releasing her. Shooting to the surface, he watched for her head to reappear. Instead, he felt wriggling fingers dig into his ribs. He whirled and clutched her, trying to return the poke in the ribs, which wasn't easy because she shifted in his grasp with the smooth rapidity of an eel. It was all he could do to hang on, but hang on he did, and the struggle suddenly became sexual.
Berina broke away laughing, and for an instant Keaflyn thought she didn't want that kind of play. Then she halted a few feet away, grinning at him and obviously awaiting pursuit.
He chased her up the length of the pool, almost catching a foot once or twice. Then he was in churning water and had the feeling he was trying to swim uphill. The water, now hot-and-cold rather than warm-and-cool, bit him excitingly.
He reached the crest of the tumultuous swell and slid down the far side to find himself and Berina thrown together in a swirling tangle of arms and legs. They were in a cup-shaped depression in the center of an upwelling current where the parawaters, having been separated and recooled and reheated, were returned to the pool. There were no words for his sensations. The uprushing current buoyed them, like heavy corks bobbing on top of a fountain, making swimming unnecessary. And the touch of the desirable body of Berina stormed his senses as powerfully as did the tingling liquid, only in a different manner. They found each other quickly and clung together endlessly, for seconds, or hours, or days, or ages. Then suddenly the hot-cold was too much. They were satiated. They released each other and attacked the upcurved wall of water around them. They went up and over, carried by the current into the relative calm of the rest of the pool. Lazily they swam ashore.
"Wow!" Keaflyn breathed, catching the towel Berina tossed him. "Do you have many more toys like that?"
"Not many," she replied, drying herself. "The pool's our best one. How's the ache?"
He paused in his toweling for a moment, then reported, "It's gone!"
"I thought it would be, after that," she said.
"Poor Neg!" he laughed. Then: "Hey, that's one way to fight it!"
She nodded, slipping into a brief one-piece costume.
"About the most effective way. Mark, you have a choice of remaining aboard if you like. Unfortunately, Sibling business makes it impossible for me to put the Calcutta at your disposal to travel to Lumon's Star or to Locus or the other stabilities you plan to investigate. My brother and I have to be elsewhere, and of course we need the ship with us. Will you stay or leave?"
He thought about it as he dressed. "You're quite a temptation, Berina," he said at last, "and so is your pool. But I may have only this lifetime in which to finish my work. I can't stay."
"Okay. Let's go eat," she said. And Keaflyn knew she would not urge him to change his mind. As they turned away from the pool he saw a teenaged couple approaching, the boy tall, dark-skinned and frowning heavily, the girl blonde, picture-pretty and serene. Berina said, "Mark, this is my brother Bart and his friend Jenvive."
The boy extended his hand. "Ah, the newly-afflicted Mr. Keaflyn," he said, his tone confident but with a touch of tension. "Welcome aboard, Mark. Will you be with us a while?"
"Thank you, Bartok," Keaflyn replied, shaking his head. "No, your sister says the Calcutta can go my way only so far, and I have my work to do."
The Junior Sibling nodded gravely. "Okay, but if the going gets too rough, come on back any time. You'll always be welcome."
"Thanks."
"Now, if you'll pardon us, I'm anxious to hit the water," said Bartok.
"Sure," said Keaflyn, and the boy and girl hurried by, shedding clothing as they went.
Grinning thoughtfully as he followed Berina toward the chute tube, Keaflyn finally said, "Forgive my rich kid and toy cracks, Berina. I was slow to
catch on to something."
"Oh? What's that?"
"That I'm not the only person in the universe possessed by a Neg."
She nodded. "There are the two of us and you. Bart and I accept it as normal now, after putting up with it for seven lifetimes. Our position makes us constant key figures. When did you start catching on?"
"Not really until I saw Bartok's painful frown," he said. "Just the three of us, you say? What about top government officials? Aren't they in key positions?"
"No. Bart and I have seen to that. We've played politics endlessly, and sometimes not very cleanly, to prevent the development of an interstellar government. With control restricted to systemic or even planetary levels and thus splintered into thousands of autonomous units, no one unit and no one individual is important enough to merit Neg attention. If we had a unified government . . . " She shuddered slightly before continuing, "Well, there were interstellar governments along the backtrack, you know, and some of them began with strength, honesty, and a reasonable degree of sanity. Without exception, they led to the most degraded, shambled societies life has ever experienced."
"Then the Negs would have to be beaten into helplessness before we can have unity," Keaflyn remarked thoughtfully.
"Total defeat of the Negs would mean total triumph for us," she agreed. "Our conquest of the universe would be total, and every atom of matter would be held and guided by a quantum of life-force. And the unity of all life would be automatic and complete, not a mere matter of having one government."
He laughed. "I'm not at all sure I'd like that."
"Nor I," she agreed. "The Negs may be nature's way of telling us, 'Don't go too far."'
Chapter 5
Keaflyn returned to his own ship a few hours later and continued toward Lumon's Star alone. His Neg did not make its presence felt during the remainder of the trip. Perhaps, he surmised, it was recuperating from the punishment it had received aboard the Calcutta.
But when he broke warp one hundred million miles away from Lumon's Star, the now-familiar ache settled once more in his body, bringing with it a sense of despair. He laughed, and that action hurt his chest. Nevertheless, he pitched into his investigative program, trying to ignore the Neg's effort to bring him to a discouraged halt before he ever began. Perhaps, he mused, his pleasure-impress would be of some help to him now. It seemed to clear a mental area around it from the Neg's influence.
"Kelly," he said to the ship, "launch the Lumon probe."
"Okay, Mark . . . it's on its way."
"Good." Keaflyn was gazing at the magnified image of Lumon's Star on the main viewscreen. It was a white star of approximately the same luminosity as Sol. A planet circling it at Keaflyn's distance could have enjoyed an Earth-type climate, but it had no planets.
Also, it had no sunspots, and thus no sunspot cycle. It was not, so far as the most sensitive instruments could detect, variable. This made it unique among all stars humanity had observed with any closeness.
Lumon's Star was visible from Terra. It was one of the myriad points of light that had filled telescopic photoplates as far back as the twentieth century, when Earth astronomers aimed their big instruments into the glow of the Milky Way. Among so many companions, it had gone unnoticed and untamed.
But just under two light-years away from it was the system of Clevlulex, where humanity in catlike bodies had watched their strange neighbor with intelligent, more-or-less objective eyes for the equivalent of eight thousand terrestrial years. Astrology was an ancient and honored study of the Cl'exians, far more central to their culture than it ever had become among the erect humans of Earth. The learned cats of Clevlulex had observed, recorded, and wondered at the never-changing aspect of the bright star in their northern skies, and had named it for a steadfast mythological character, Lumon.
Only after the exploratory teams from Earth began to arrive was the star's uniqueness in the explored area of the galaxy fully appreciated. Then it was added to the short list of phenomena called stabilities because they showed no signs of being influenced by the processes of change that were at work on everything else within human experience.
There had been some argument about putting Lumon's Star on the list. How could a body that was producing and pouring out a constant flood of energy be a stability? the opponents demanded. Nuclear fusion was going on inside the star, transmuting its elements and therefore changing it. By definition, it could not be a stability.
But Cl'exian records were definite. So far as appearance was concerned, Lumon's Star had acted like a stability for eight thousand years. How could a radiating star be a stability? How could anything be a stability? Lumon's proponents retorted. Entropy was doing its work on all normal objects, merely more visibly and spectacularly so in a star than in a cold chunk of stone. Thus, when the arguments were over, the star was on the list. But the fact that Lumon's Star did radiate, Keaflyn mused, had a lot to do with his decision to start his investigation with it. An active process of energy-production was easier to study than inert matter that insisted on remaining inert.
"All detectors on full, Kelly?" he asked.
"Yes, Mark. The probe is now in the lower corona."
"Report on redundancy?"
"Still one hundred percent for all systems, Mark."
"Good. If hyper-redundancy works as I think it will, that star's going to start giving up some secrets in a very few minutes now."
Stellar probes, resistant against the extreme energies and pressures inside stars, were standard items of astrophysical research. The probes had failed, however, when sent into Lumon's Star. Why they failed nobody knew. They simply quit reporting shortly after entering the star proper, in what was presumed to be an upper layer of turbulent convection.
Keaflyn's probe was not standard. All of its systems featured hyper-redundant circuitry—not two or three duplications of means to handle each necessary function, but on the order of twenty thousand duplications. Each component was in actuality an array of similar minicomponents, any one of which was sufficient to keep the component's function going. And the arrays were joined to each other through in-service-seeking circuitry blocks, so that even if only one of the minicomponents remained operational at each step, the circuitry would seek these out, link them together, and the probe would continue to do its work.
"The probe is now subsurface, Mark," the ship reported.
"Okay." Keaflyn felt a surge of excitement that nullified much of his physical pain and vanquished what lingered of his feeling of despair. He had been working toward this moment, this actual test of a stability, for a long time. This was the payoff, and his emotional response to it was too strong and too positive for his Neg to override.
He studied the readouts with a face-splitting grin, but depended on the Kelkontar's summation circuits for interpretation of what he was seeing. "Trace instabilities?" he asked.
"No significant indications," the ship replied. "All turbulence patterns are standing."
He nodded. Standard probes had lasted long enough inside Lumon's Star to report that, in the upper layer, energy was being carried outward by swirling flows of matter. But, unlike the comparable layer of normal stars, these flows seemed permanent, unshifting, unchanging. Unturbulent turbulence, he thought with a chuckle.
"Redundancy?"
"Ninety-eight point two percent," the ship replied.
"Any pattern in the loss there?"
A pause. "Perhaps . . . yes, Mark, it's more definite now. A definite statistical indication that the destructive agent has a small cross section."
Keaflyn blinked. "You mean our probe is being pinpricked to death?"
"Yes, in a manner of speaking. Redundancy now eighty-six percent. The destructive cross sections are approximately atomic in size."
"I can't imagine an atom smashing its way through the probe's defenses," said Mark. "But of course a stabilitytype atom . . . The probe's kinetic sensor is picking up the bombardment, isn't it?"
"No. There is no i
ndication of internal atomic bombardment, Mark. Redundancy now seventy-two percent, with probe entering the radiative flow zone."
"Contramatter atoms," Keaflyn hazarded hurriedly, very conscious of the speeded decline of the probe's redundancy. "What energy level inside the probe now?"
"Twelve percent above normal, Mark."
"I must have contramatter on the brain," he muttered.
"It can't be that or the probe would be plasma by now." He cast about frantically for some other possible answer, something to check on while the probe was still operational. "Is anything reading unexplainably?" he demanded, hoping he was not asking the question in a manner the ship's computer could not interpret.
"Yes, Mark. The AV shield is drawing decreasing power but is remaining intact. Redundancy thirty-eight percent."
The AV shield? That was a modified warpfield. It could draw less power only if its area were reduced. And that just didn't happen, except when warpfields overlapped each other, as when two ships in warpflight came together for docking or . . .
"Kelly," he snapped, "could those pinpoints be tiny warps of some kind?"
"I don't know, Mark. Warps require power supplies and formulators. Redundancy, nineteen percent."
"Our warps do," said Keaflyn, "but tiny, atom-sized warps seem to fit what's destroying the probe. Warpicles! Particle warps! We've used the warp phenomenon for centuries, but have never quantized it! Does that fit what's happening?"
After a hesitation the Kelkontar replied, "So far as our probe is equipped to detect events, Mark, that could be the answer."
"Let's try to pin it down," Keaflyn said hurriedly. "Signal the probe to modify by switching the trace-increment monitor into the AV power link."
"I can't, Mark. Redundancy is now zero."
The ache moved back into Keaflyn's body. "The probe's dead?"
"Yes."
"Well . . . maybe when we analyze all the data we did get . . . Did our probe have any detectable effect on the star's behavior?"
A Sense of Infinity Page 14
