"I had no preference, Mark," said the ship.
"Sorry, Kelly. I was talking to myself, more or less." Keaflyn wondered just how much of what he was doing actually got through to the Neg. It was evident that the mental invader could observe events taking place around him; for instance, it always seemed to know when other persons of uncertain intent were around, persons who might be led by evidence of its presence to harm or in some manner foil its human host.
And sometimes, when it became obvious that nearby people were not going to harm Keaflyn, it seemed to know that, too, and relaxed its influence on him.
Could it read his thoughts?
Not exactly, Keaflyn concluded after searching his memory of the Neg's reactions. But it could identify different thought processes. Maybe, right now, it knew he was thinking analytically, and perhaps it could tell that it was the subject being analyzed. Probably it could distinguish between his analytic thought and his moments of creative thought. Those latter moments were apparently very rough on it, because it invariably retreated somewhat at such times.
As to other evidence of its abilities, above all, it had known what he was doing mentally when he had nulled the Resistant Globe.
So it recognized mental actions but did not necessarily follow the content of those actions.
What about his research? Could it understand and perhaps profit from his work, learning of it from his conversations with the ship and from the results displayed on the workboard? Was he feeding the Neg—and through it the contralife universe—data to be used by contralife in the eternal conflict with the universe of humanity?
He laughed when the answer struck him. Of course not! Knowledge—any knowledge—was anathema to contralife. The normuniverse and contrauniverse did not seesaw, one expanding while the other contracted. Seesawing is the balancing of similars, whereas the two universes were dissimilars: one positive, one negative. They balanced by rising and falling in unison. And knowledge expanded the reality of either universe—or more precisely, it expanded the reality of both universes.
Since the goal of contralife was contraction to total nonbeing, the Negs would abhor learning with the same instinctive revulsion that normal beings abhorred ignorance. Knowledge was survival, which Negs didn't want. Ignorance was death, which they sought.
Keaflyn grinned with glee. The Negs had been catching some rough going, he suspected, for more than a millennium now—since the Renaissance period on Earth, approximately speaking. They were being plunged into knowledge, just as humanity in the distant past had so often and so inexplicably been plunged into ignorance. However, the Negs would use their unwanted knowledge in their struggle for nonsurvival. This ability of his Neg to impinge itself on a normuniverse being had to be the result of learning. In an era when the Negs were winning, perhaps they would celebrate a major victory when ignorance advanced to the point where the ability to impinge was lost.
Of course, the flow of battle was not smooth in either direction, Keaflyn mused. Humanity had had its handful of stalwart men of learning in the most ignorant ages. On the other hand, even now, the road toward advancement of knowledge was strewn with pitfalls. He could personally attest to that!
He recalled Berina Arlan's remark that a sure way to learn whether or not a gun is loaded is to pull the trigger—sure but possibly dangerous. Truth-seekers of all times had banged their heads on that wall, on which was written in large but conservative letters: Beyond this boundary lies knowledge too dangerous for the mind of man.
Human lore was full of that. Adam and Eve had been punished for eating forbidden fruit—knowledge of good and evil. Prometheus had caught hell for giving man fire. The son of Daedalus, the inventor of manned flight, had fallen to his death. Keaflyn chuckled. Edison had started going deaf before inventing the phonograph. Had that been punishment or preparatory self-protection?
He pushed this intrusion from his pleasure-impress aside. The point was that the bugaboo of deadly knowledge still lingered in his own presumably enlightened age.
Why? Was there in actuality a boundary the mind should not violate? Was the belief in the bugaboo the visible symptom of a deep, unexplored instinct, the purpose of which was to protect humanity from knowledge that would, in fact, be utterly harmful?
That humanity, that life itself had unexplored instincts had been made evident by the startling reaction to the compromising of the Resistant Globe—the Insecurity. That wasn't really surprising, Keaflyn decided. As a physicist, he felt strongly the basic unity of all nature, the tight dovetailing of matter-energy-space-time-positivenegative-knowledge-ignorance-mind. Nobody knew the topography of all the intricate dovetails, all the bindings that preserved the unity.
So, people might play at destroying a stability, but when the stability was seriously threatened, the restoring reaction was immediate and powerful—and also, he felt sure, completely adequate.
Similarly, if there was such a thing as utterly dangerous knowledge, would it not be counteracted as effectively? Would not some factor built into the total unity shout "No!" to such knowledge with as telling effect as that by which the destruction of a stability had been overruled? But if so, why all the concern over acquiring knowledge that obviously fell far short of the forbidden area? Why the old fear that even a little learning was a dangerous thing?
Maybe, he hazarded, because the No! that would be given to dangerous knowledge might be, itself, a ruinously painful experience. The mighty, according to the warnings of tradition, fall extremely hard.
Keaflyn snorted at himself for indulging in this lengthy bout of not-very-original wool-gathering. He rose from his chair and went to stare at the viewscreen.
"Detecting anything up ahead, Kelly?" he asked.
"Yes, Mark. Within the next four hundred light-years, our line will pass close by two stars, one of which is beginning to separate into a binary."
"No star clusters near the line?"
"No."
"A Locus body might not be with a star at all. Our line gets less precise every minute. We could shoot by what we're looking for without coming in detection range of it."
"That is true, Mark," the ship agreed.
"Well," said Keaflyn after a pause, "that would be our tough luck. Everything holding up okay?"
"Yes. We are now go for twenty-four days of warp without resupply."
Keaflyn nodded. He would not have to think of turning back for another week.
Chapter 10
The space between galaxies was not devoid of stars; they were merely thinly scattered—so scattered, in fact, that none would have been visible ahead of the ship to Keaflyn's unaided eyes. The Kelkontar's sensors were picking up radiation from some two dozen that were bright enough and near enough to detect. These were displayed on the viewscreen.
But compared to the interior of the galaxy, this was emptiness.
If life created the universe, thought Keaflyn with some amusement, why did it put so much space in it? What was it all good for, when life itself showed so strong a preference for the confines of small planets?
"Mark," said the ship, "the binary we're approaching has curvilinear motion."
"You mean, besides the motion of the two stars around each other?" Keaflyn asked hopefully.
"Yes. Their mutual rotation was evident shortly after I detected their separation. And now, after two hundred light-years of approach, it is becoming evident that they are orbiting as a pair, and very slowly, about a still-invisible body."
"Hey! That could be it!" yelped Keaflyn, thinking of Locus, back in the galaxy, and its star, Sol-Locus.
A system containing a Locus type body had to be a prodigy. A star could capture (or be captured by) such a planet, but since a Locus body was stationary in space, the star could not swing it in an orbit. The star itself had to do the orbiting or else move on. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog, and wagging it very slowly. The far more massive star proceeded about its little primary in a barely noticeable creep, completing its circl
e in something over four thousand Earth-years. The original relative motion of planet and star had to have been almost that slow; otherwise the capture could not have occurred. Thus, if the binary the ship was now approaching was orbiting something so slowly that the motion had required two hundred years to reveal itself, and the primary was so small as to remain unseen from this distance, then they had probably found a second Locus! Better make that Locus2, Keaflyn decided.
And Locus2 it really was, he discovered as the ship moved into the system. The final light-hours of approach, with sensors studying the small planet, found no slightest indication of motion. Like Locus1, it was an airless globe of stone, approximately Mars-size.
"I presume nobody's around," said Keaflyn, "but try to raise someone on the comm, just to be sure.
"Okay, Mark."
Keaflyn almost hoped someone would respond to the ship's call, even an ardent Sect Dualer. It was one thing to have a high degree of self-sufficiency, but something else to be several thousand light-years from the nearest known living being. True, his ship could talk to him, but a vocal computer was not really company. Neither was his Neg.
He hadn't planned to do his stability-probing in this kind of solitude. Tinker had intended to accompany him. They had planned on it for a couple of lifetimes. But the plan had been disrupted by the Brobdinagia disaster. The explosion of that interstellar liner had killed Tinker's nine-year-old body, and even though her ego-field had promptly found itself a new infant, she was still only an eleven-year-old child in her present body. The decade Tinker had lost in the crash left her at least six years short of proper mating age, and thinking back to his meeting with her on Terra, Keaflyn realized that he hadn't been especially disappointed by that at the time. After all, he had thought then what was a mere six or eight years? He could wait for her to grow up. Also, his pleasure-impress had been influencing him strongly at that time, and he had tended to be entertained by the comic aspects of his and Tinker's predicament.
It seemed less funny now as he gazed out at the lifeless globe of Locus2. He felt isolated. Even if he were back in the galaxy, the drab thought came to him, he would still be a man alone. Except, maybe, for Tinker and Alo Felston. Perhaps they were still friends he could turn to, but after the Resistant Globe debacle he certainly couldn't count on any others, not even the Arlan Siblings, who had promised their aid any time he needed it in fighting his Neg. From what Penchat had told him, the Arlans were now siding with the Sect Dualers.
Why not beat it back to the galaxy right now, to Tinker's home on Danolae? He could at least kiss her and bounce her on his knee and talk to her . . .
"Damn!" he gasped suddenly, starting out of his blue funk. That lousy Neg! It had really found an opening through which to throw an emotional punch at him. It had had him going for a minute there. Self-pity, of all things!
The realization helped him push back the Neginduced emotion which, as before in a similar circumstance, had tried to stop him from continuing his research project. "Kelly," he said, "pick out a landing site with a reasonable ground temperature and set down. Probably the twilight band, wouldn't you say?"
"Right, Mark. An unshaded twilight area should be suitable. You will not find the radiation from the binary troublesome at this distance."
"Good."
The ship spiraled down to a smooth-surfaced plateau of unbroken stone, while Keaflyn suited up. A slight thud told him when they touched down.
"I'm cycling out, Kelly. Send the supplies and equipment out after me, according to plan."
He went through the lock and stepped down to the stone of Locus2. He wondered briefly if he were the first being ever to touch this world, but that was a question of no importance, and he had work to do. Besides, he now had a severe headache. The Neg, having been thwarted when it hit him with an emotion, was now coming back with a psychosomatic, something more difficult for Keaflyn to think his way out of. And he hadn't bothered to equip his vacsuit to feed him aspirins.
He grimaced and began setting up his temporary shelter and experimental equipment as the Kelkontar fed the cases through the lock. The shelter, with its anti-meteor screens, was more elaborate than he expected was needed here. There were no signs that the surface of Locus2 had ever been subject to particle bombardment. When the job was done, he went back into the ship for aspirin and a ship-cooked meal, then outside once more, to make precise adjustments in preparation for the first test.
"I'm about ready, Kelly," he announced at last. "Take off for my zenith."
"Okay, Mark," the reply sounded inside his helmet. The Kelkontar lifted away, and Keaflyn threw back his head to watch the ship diminish out of sight before turning his attention to the tracking sensors.
When the ship was five light-minutes up, he said, "Okay, Kelly, turn on your light and start the data flow."
"Light and data flow, on, Mark."
Keaflyn waited out the five minutes, then peered upward, wondering if the laser beam from the ship would be bright enough for his eyes to see at this distance. Several more seconds passed. Then an indicator flashed on the control panel at Keaflyn's side. The laser beam had registered. Somewhat more than ten seconds later, the flash went off. Another ten-seconds-plus interval, and it came on again. The cycle repeated a dozen times, then the flash began to flicker uncertainly.
"You're out of range now, Kelly," Keaflyn called.
"Head back down."
"Right, Mark. Reversing direction."
The ship, using no warp for the duration of the experiment, would take a while slowing to a standstill and then getting back into range of the instruments. Keaflyn went into the shelter, removed his helmet, and took two more of the aspirins with a glass of Terratea. In a moment he felt better, either from the medication or because the Neg, discovering its inability to defeat him, was slacking off. When the ship was due back in range, he rehelmeted and returned to the control panel outside.
Shortly the ten-second laser beam bursts were being received once more and were precisely measured for frequency and propagation speed. As the ship was now approaching, the bursts lasted for something less than ten seconds at the receiving end.
"Now braking, Mark," the ship announced after a few minutes had passed.
"Okay. Swerve off and get set for the tangent run,"
Keaflyn directed.
This involved another wait while the Kelkontar moved off a few hundred million miles to a position on Keaflyn's horizon, then lined up on a course that would enable it to pass at high speed directly over the observation site.
Once more, measurements would be made of frequency and propagation of a laser beam transmitted by the ship, this time under conditions that would—for a split-second—bring transmitter and receiver to within one hundred meters of each other, and with the transmitter very near the Locus2 surface.
The experiment was carried out as planned, the ship zipping past Keaflyn's position so fast that his senses did not register it at all. "Was it a good run, Kelly, directly overhead?"
"Yes, Mark. I passed fourteen meters to your left at an altitude of ninety-three meters."
"Good enough. Come on in and pick up my data. Then we'll see if we have to do anything over."
Shortly thereafter the ship dropped to the ground by the observation site, and Keaflyn carried his reels of recorded information aboard and fed them into the ship's computers. There his data was compared with information the ship had recorded of its own movements relative to the site. Several minutes passed before the ship announced:
"Calculations are complete, Mark. The results indicate no deviation from straight addition-of-velocities. My velocity corresponded precisely at all times to the difference between the velocity of the received laser signal and the normal speed of light."
"No relativistic effects crept in at all?" demanded Keaflyn. "Not the slightest trace of the time-space contraction?"
"None at all, Mark."
"Humpf! Well, that's that, I suppose," muttered Keaflyn. "No fuzzi
ness in the data?"
"The readings were quite clear, Mark, on the order of two hundred times more precise than in any earlier similar experiment."
Keaflyn nodded. His methodology in the study of stabilities involved, basically, just that: testing with equipment far more precise than previously used, in an effort to find a trace of instability in the stabilities . . . some slight tendency toward the behavior of normal matterenergy objects. He had spent the most of two previous lifetimes searching out those ultra-accurate means of testing and getting the needed equipment fabricated. And in the case of Locus2, at least, all he had proved was that the stability held up to a couple of additional decimal points.
On that body, light being received from a moving source did not obey the law of relativity. Light speed there was not a constant. If the source were approaching the planet, its light would have the additional velocity of the approach. If the source were moving away, its speed would be subtracted from that of its light.
Why?
Well, that was the way this particular stability worked. No better explanation than that had been found. Presumably it had something to do with the motionlessness of Locus; it was fixed in space. Other objects moved relative to Locus, but Locus moved relative to nothing. So, no relative motion, no relativistic effects.
Probably, Keaflyn mused, his experiment had proved just how firmly fixed in position Locus2 really was.
And, come to think about it, his methodology of seeking traces of instability had not worked on Lumon's Star, either. What he had discovered there—warpicles—pertained to the nature of that particular stability, not to its limitations.
But completely unintentionally, he had been instrumental in revealing a limit to the resistance of the Resistant Globe of Bensor-on-Bensor. The Globe could be nulled by mind, provided both contralife and normlife mind were included in the action.
"One thing we did find out, Kelly," he consoled himself, "is that there is more than one Locus, and there could be a whole gridwork of them." He paused in his work of repacking his test equipment. "By the way, does this one have a magnetic field?"
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