A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  "Yes, Mark."

  "Pointed back at Locus1, I bet."

  "No. The magnetic poles form a line perpendicular to our line of approach," the ship said.

  "Um. That makes sense, I suppose. If the poles were in line, that would indicate nothing more than a string of Locuses. But if every other one has its poles at a 90–degree angle, that implies squares and cubes . . . a grid, in short. Tell you what, Kelly. After we get you loaded, we'll follow up the magnetic line of this one, and see if we can hit a Locus3 at the same distance as Locus1. That'll prove we have a three-dimensional grid, won't it?"

  "Not beyond argument, Mark.."

  "But substantially." Keaflyn worked in silence for several minutes. Then he said, "The proof would be more substantial if we found a Locus3 at the proper distance on a line perpendicular to the magnetic fields of both Locus1 and Locus2. Right?"

  "Yes, that would be more convincing."

  "Then that's the line we'll take, straight out from this one's magnetic equator, and ninety degrees away from our line of approach from Locus."

  Locus3 was there, where he had predicted it would be. It was fortunate that the Kelkontar knew the precise line to follow and the distance at which to search, because this Locus had no sun and could easily have been missed if they had not known just where to look. Again Keaflyn spent a few hours on the ground, running a series of tests similar to those done on Locus2, to verify that this dark little world was a true Locus body. When he was aboard the ship once more, he said, "That's enough Locuses to satisfy me, Kelly, and by the time we get back to civilization you'll be about due for a check-up and resupply. So head for home."

  "For Bensor, Mark?"

  "From this distance, it wouldn't matter by many degrees which system you aimed at," chuckled Keaflyn.

  "No . . . not Bensor. Let's go to Danolae."

  "Okay, Mark."

  Getting his ship checked out and its consumables replenished was going to require cooperation—something the average citizen could take for granted on any known world of humanity. But Keaflyn had a hunch he was going to need the help of special friends to get that chore handled.

  And certainly Tinker and Alo Felston were still friends. If they weren't. . .

  He shrugged and giggled. Of course they were his friends! They had to be.

  He dismissed the thought, gulped two aspirins, and got busy putting his findings on the Locuses into publishable form.

  Chapter 11

  But as he neared the Danolae system, he had second thoughts.

  Granted that Tinker and Felston were people who would do everything they could to help him. He knew that, but the trouble was, so did everyone else. He had to assume, until he discovered differently, that most of humanity was still upset over the Resistant Globe affair and would be eager to confine him, or give him another dose of the Sect Dualers' treatment.

  So, wouldn't his known friends be under close observation? Would they not, in fact, be the bait of cleverly concealed traps by this time?

  Keaflyn grunted his annoyance. His mind just wasn't geared for scheming, nor for anticipating schemes. That was an antiquated approach to personal relationships, one that bespoke a distrust of one's fellows and the universe that was hardly appropriate in 29th-century society. Except, of course, for the Sect Dualers who, even though they were technically sane, had something of a wartime psychology because of their constant mindfulness of the contralife threat.

  But even in backtrack ages, Keaflyn mused dolefully, he had never been an able schemer. He had always been the unsuspecting patsy, the artless scholar, the maker of the politically unwise remark, the revealer of sensitive information, the blind walker into traps, the tool of the clever and unscrupulous . . .

  There was, for instance, that life back in the 20th Century, when he had tried to found an electronics company to develop and produce a couple of items he had invented. His money-men had taken him mercilessly—so badly, in fact, that that was one of his very few lives that had ended in suicide.

  Damn it, he had to wise up! he told himself grimly. Be as underhanded and a thousand times as clever as a Shakespearean villain! If he were to stay alive and keep his freedom of action against the wishes of everybody else, he would have to make a point of out-scheming the schemers.

  Yet, even as he told himself this, he knew it was useless. He simply lacked the knack for that kind of thinking. He had thought that he had kept his recent visit to Bensor a secret, that be could handle his business there and be gone before the Sect Dualers became aware of his presence. But he had reckoned without a true grasp of the painstakingness of experienced plotters. It had never occurred to him that the Dualers would be keeping a lookout for him at the plant of Donflannis Instras Corporation. So he had gone to confer with his friend John Donflannis, and the Sect Dualers had grabbed him as soon as he left the plant.

  He would always overlook some such possibility as that, he suspected, because he was a no-talent amateur at this game, up against professionals. To them, the cleverest trick he could think of would probably be obvious and hackneyed, maybe even stupid.

  Like the idea he was thinking about now: Instead of trying to contact Tinker directly, he would call her father, Clav Didorik. Didorik would certainly not be considered an ally of Keaflyn's but might be trusted to be neutral. In any event, Didorik was not likely to be bait in a trap. And perhaps, came the hopeful thought, the schemers would not really believe their quarry was stupid enough to come to Danolae at all . . .

  "Kelly, raise comm with Clav Didorik of Danolae for me," he directed. "If he wants to know who's calling, tell him Spence Spargon." Keaflyn invented the Spargon name on the spur of the moment.

  Several seconds later Didorik's hard and heavy face appeared on the screen. He blinked when he saw who "Spence Spargon" was, and then studied him in silence a moment before saying, "What can I do for you, Mr. Spargon?"

  "I'm not sure, Mr. Didorik," Keaflyn replied. "I'd like to discuss a number of possibilities with you, privately."

  "Sure. Come on down. I'll give your ship my location code."

  "Would it be too much of an imposition to ask you to come up to my ship?" Keaflyn asked.

  "Um. Well. Up to your ship, huh? I suppose I can do that. I have a one-man launch here. I'll call your ship back for a guidebeam as soon as I'm aboard. In five minutes."

  Keaflyn nodded. Didorik apparently understood his feeling of need for caution. "That'll be fine. See you soon."

  Some seventy minutes later Didorik cycled aboard the Kelkontar, flipped his helmet off and removed a spaceglove before extending a hand to Keaflyn.

  "Well, Mark, you've made a name for yourself in a few short weeks," he commented with a cold smile.

  "Not quite the way I intended, Clav. Thanks for coming up," Keaflyn replied, shaking the hand. "The name I've made seems to be mud."

  Didorik gave a short affirming nod. "Just what the hell were you trying to do to the Resistant Globe, anyway?" he asked.

  "Nothing, really. That is, I wasn't experimenting on it. I merely nulled it, the way I've done a dozen times before, and the way about every sightseer who comes to Bensor-on-Bensor does. What happened was that my Neg invader suddenly did the same thing, and that caused all the ruckus."

  "Couldn't you keep any control over the Neg?"

  Didorik demanded.

  "Not on that, I couldn't. You see, I gave him an opening. All he had to do was agree with what I was doing. It wasn't a matter of his taking control or my denying control."

  "Can he—or it—take control?" Didorik asked pointedly.

  "No. He can give me a bad moment emotionally now and then or keep me in nearly constant pain. He can't guide my thoughts or actions."

  Didorik found himself a seat. "Enough pain can control action, by paralysis," he remarked.

  "I've thought of that," said Keaflyn. "The answer must be that it's beyond his power to hit me with that much pain. His purpose is to kill me. He could do that by paralyzing me any time I pu
t on a vacsuit. I'd be helpless, and my ship would be unable to help me. He could hold me there until I starved to death."

  "You seem sure his purpose is to kill you. Why?"

  "Because of my stabilities research," shrugged Keaflyn. "If our gains of knowledge are defeats for the Negs, I've already given them a pretty hard time." He giggled.

  "Well, you won't do much more," Didorik grunted.

  "You've been blocked away from every stability for the past couple of weeks, I hear. Where have you been, Mark? Drifting in space, waiting for the heat to die down?"

  Keaflyn laughed. "Believe it or not, I've been probing two previously undiscovered stabilities. I call them Locus2 and Locus3. In fact, I have a paper about them here. If I can't visit Tinker, I'd like for you to pass it along to her, with instructions that she steer it through Science Reporting Service in my behalf."

  He handed Didorik the manuscript and waited while the man flipped curiously through its pages. "Two more Locuses, huh?" Didorik murmured, sounding impressed.

  "An infinite number of Locuses," Keaflyn beamed.

  "What about the other stabilities? An infinite number of all of them?"

  "I think so. That's the impression I got from a hint dropped on Avalon. Of course the others aren't necessarily evenly spaced in a gridwork, and I can't find them easily, but—"

  "You've been on Avalon?" bleated Didorik.

  "Yes," Keaflyn replied, smiling broadly.

  "You really get around." Didorik sounded a bit overwhelmed.

  "All in the line of the job," Keaflyn said, feeling flippant. "Avalon is itself a stability, and the ego-fields who live on it are. You know, the ones people are always wondering what became of: like Einstein, Beethoven, Marie Curie, to mention a few of the more famous.

  "You met them?"

  "Those three, and a dozen or so more."

  "That means the ancient religionists were right," mused Didorik. "There is a heaven for sufficiently righteous souls."

  "Not exactly. An ego-field winds up on Avalon as a result of a lifetime in which it fulfills whatever potential it has. Any more lives after that would be anticlimactic—a sort of waste. So the ego-field goes to Avalon and no longer participates in the birth-death cycle. Righteousness has nothing to do with it."

  "I see." For a minute Didorik sat silent, frowning in thought. Then he straightened up and looked Keaflyn in the eye.

  "I'll do whatever I can to help you, Mark," he said, "despite the fact that your constant tittering annoys the hell out of me and you seem too damned proud of yourself. Maybe that pleasure-impress is responsible for the giggle, and the Neg might be doing something to make you act conceited. But too many centuries have passed since a mob was allowed to interfere with an individual's freedom for me to condone any backsliding now! Besides, I'm impressed by what you've accomplished. Is it true you found a way to improve the warpdrive, and this ship can now run circles around anything else in space?"

  "It can practically englobe anything else!" snorted Keaflyn, then caught himself. "Sorry, Clav. You're right. That Neg is trying to make me insufferable right now. It's back under control. Thanks for calling my attention to it."

  "Okay. Forget it. Now, about this warpdrive: I can see why you have to keep a monopoly on it for the time being. But don't keep it too secret. If something happens to you, the drive shouldn't be lost."

  "Right. My ship knows all about it, and if I get knocked off, the ship is instructed to turn itself over to Tinker."

  "Not good enough. The way things stand, you and your ship could be vaporized at the same instant," Didorik told him.

  Keaflyn grimaced at this bald verification of danger.

  "Damn it," he sniveled, "Don't they realize I can't take dying in my condition? A death would be the ruin of me as an ego-field!"

  "Not only do they know it; they're counting on it," Didorik told him harshly. "Now, snap out of it and let's figure something out on this warpdrive of yours!" Keaflyn realized the Neg had been trying another emotional gambit on him. He sat up straight. "Right. I see your point, but that's not the kind of problem I'm good at. What do you suggest, Clav?"

  "Well, I don't suggest you give me the secret," Didorik grunted. "And I forbid you to give it to my daughter. With everybody so upset, some fanatic might try torturing the secret out of her. In fact, you'd better not even talk to her, so nobody will get the idea that you might have told her about the drive."

  Keaflyn considered this and nodded reluctantly. "I can't understand why people are suddenly afflicted with so much emotional thinking about me," he complained.

  "After all, the Resistant Globe wasn't really damaged, was it?"

  "No, evidently it wasn't," said Didorik, "but that's not the point. The way I analyze it, there are two reasons. One, you showed everybody that a stability can be damaged, can even be obliterated, and that we have enemies whom nobody but the Sect Dualers took seriously before, but who are nearly powerful enough to do the obliterating. Our universe is suddenly less secure than we thought, and that shakes a man.

  "Two, the Insecurity triggered a stimulus-response reaction in everybody. For the first time in centuries, people found themselves taking an unreasoned action. They were fighting to put down the Insecurity on an instinctive level, and after it was over with that bothered them. It bothered me! A sane man expects to keep control of himself. That's what sanity is, basically.

  "What it boils down to is that you've undermined people's confidence in their universe and in themselves, Mark. You've shown them—us—that some very important unknowns still exist, and that what we don't know can hurt us."

  "And that makes me a public enemy," said Keaflyn.

  "Sure it does! What's so strange about that? Hell, the men who have invented steam engines from time to time and deprived people of the security of being slave laborers were public enemies. So were the doctors who described microbes, invisible carriers of death. And the astronomers who announced that their home planet wasn't the stationary center of a revolving universe. It's happened plenty of times!"

  "Perhaps so," argued Keaflyn, "but people are supposed to be sane today. Take yourself, for example, Clav. You're reacting rationally, so why can't everybody else?" Didorik gave him a hard stare. "The hell I'm reacting rationally!" he growled. "I'd kill you right now, Mark, if I thought it would do a damned bit of good!"

  Keaflyn sat back, startled. "The point is, though, that you do know it wouldn't do any good," he countered.

  "No, I don't know that. It's merely my opinion," said Didorik. "And I can see how others could differ with my opinion."

  Keaflyn gave a dazed titter, and sat in silence for a long while. Finally he said tentatively, "You wanted to decide something about my new warpdrive."

  "Yeah," grunted Didorik "Look. You wouldn't be doing anybody a favor—anybody you could trust to keep your secret—by giving it to them. So that's not the solution. How about this: couldn't you disclose something about the theory behind the new drive, maybe even send it to Science Reporting Service? Don't tell how it works or how it's made but just enough of the theory so that in time someone else could duplicate the application you've made of it."

  Keaflyn laughed. "An excellent solution, Clav! Leave it to me. Thanks!"

  "Don't put off doing it," Didorik warned.

  "I won't," said Keaflyn. He was vastly amused, because they had been worrying over a problem that he had already solved. The report on his investigation of Lumon's Star, which he had turned over to John Donflannis back on Bensor, gave all the theoretical data any competent warp engineer would need for the development of his improved drive. Especially if the engineer knew in advance that such a drive had probably been based on that theory.

  "You would prefer that I not talk to Tinker," he said.

  "Under the circumstances it could be ill-advised,"

  Didorik said firmly.

  "Has she started her research on the pleasureimpress yet?"

  "Yes, like a ball of fire! Your ex-cowpoke
pal, Alo Felston, is working with her—a big help, she says. And since the Insecurity she's recruited a number of others—people who are interested in the 'Keaflyn problem,' as I've heard them call it."

  "Any results yet?"

  "Don't know. Probably nothing that would help you. They're working with animals, and the idea seems to be to peel off traumas from animal ego-fields until they come to a pleasure-impress like yours, and then see what they can do with it. So far as I know, they're still in the peeling stage."

  "I'm not counting on help from them," Keaflyn said.

  "In the first place, it's only educated guesswork that extremely old pleasure-impresses are a cause of all the animal-level ego-fields in existence: And unburdening an animal, with its limitations of nervous system, of backlife traumas is a major research project in itself. Also even if they do succeed in uncovering a pleasure-impress, the big job of finding a way to break it will remain."

  He paused, then chuckled. "That's why I've got to stay loose, Didorik. Tomorrow I may be a camel."

  Didorik frowned. "That's an exaggeration," he protested.

  "Maybe so, but death traumas fasten onto pleasureimpresses," said Keaflyn, "and fasten tight. I'll be a somewhat degraded ego-field in my next lifetime, perhaps too degraded to claim a human body against the stiff competition of able ego-fields. So I might wind up in an animal body and get loaded with another death trauma when that body dies, then on to another animal body, and so on down the ladder. Tinker's the expert in that field, and she didn't offer me any hope of another human lifetime.

  "So anything I accomplish as a human, I accomplish now. And I need help getting my ship checked and resupplied."

  "Oh." Didorik thought about it a moment, then said, "I can't promise you total safety, Mark, but if you want to take the chance of landing at my place, I can service your ship."

  "I can't ask a better offer than that. Thanks. Maybe if I stay aboard and out of sight . . . "

  "That would help," Didorik nodded. "The ship can do its own loading and storing. Only a couple of maintenance technicians will have to come aboard, and I have two good men for that. Both of them took the Insecurity business in a levelheaded way, so I think you can trust them."