A Sense of Infinity

by Howard L. Myers

  "Her Neg?" asked Tinker.

  "Sure. Didn't know that, did you? The Arlans have been Neg-ridden for several lifetimes. That's how important the Negs think they are."

  "Go on," Tinker said.

  "Well, nothing much after that, except being in a state of terror. I was taken to an apartment where I was confined. I got some sleep, then the Junior Sibling came and helped me escape. I started to go to Danolae, to get you to do this, but after having a few drinks to ease my nerves, I decided to take one last crack at the Whorl. When I changed course I found out the Arlans had been tailing me, out of my detector range. I wound up diving into the Whorl because I thought it might wipe me out, ego-field and all . . . and here I am."

  "Good," approved Tinker. "Now, let's look at it again, from the time you entered the room where the Senior Sibling was."

  Keaflyn sighed and fidgeted. He knew that in the course of therapy he was going to have to face each instant of the torture of those horrible machines. The prospect was utterly depressing.

  "I thought you and Alo had found better ways of doing things than this," he protested. "If you can strip the traumas of dogs and goats you must use a method that's easier on the patient."

  "That's true," said Tinker, "but I can't use our new methods on you—first because they have to be done at arm's length, not via comm, and second, because they require the use of drugs you don't have and that are too complex for your ship to manufacture."

  "Kelly can make aspirin," Keaflyn countered. "How do you know he can't make your drugs?"

  "I'm quite sure Kelly doesn't carry the necessary ingredients," she replied. "I'll feed your ship the data on the drugs, if you like, just to make sure."

  "Good!" exclaimed Keaflyn in relief. "I'll take a coffee break in the meantime." He started to stand.

  "No," she ruled firmly, but with a smile. "We'll keep working in the meantime."

  "I'll do better after a little rest," he argued.

  "Didn't I hear someone being caustic a short while ago about the leisurely pace of everyone else?" she purred.

  "Okay, so I'm scared!" he flared. "It's not good therapy to use a patient's words against him!"

  "I know," she agreed. "But I also know in your case I can get away with it."

  He gave a bark of a laugh. "You win, Tinker. Let's get on with it."

  Two hours later, when she decided he had done enough for one day, they had hardly smoothed down the surfaces of the machine-installed impresses.

  And thus it continued, two or three hours a day, for more than a week.

  "Damn it," he fretted once, "there was uglier stuff than this on my backtrack that I blew with nothing like this kind of struggle!"

  "Yes, but your backtrack impresses weren't attached to a basic pleasure-impress."

  "Oh, yeah," he nodded, remembering.

  Pleasure-impresses would not yield to any known therapy because of the fundamental reluctance of an egofield to relinquish pleasure—even pleasure intensified to the level of debilitating pain. And traumas experienced later tended to attach to the pleasure-impress. Given sufficient therapeutic attention, these later incidents could be deintensified somewhat but could never be blown completely as long as that underlying pleasureimpress was in place.

  "We can't clean this stuff out completely," he said.

  "No, but we're making progress," replied Tinker.

  "Why don't you ask your ship about your verbalization speed?"

  Keaflyn blinked. "What's she talking about, Kelly?" he asked.

  "Tinker is doubtless referring to the fact that your speech has been approaching normal tempo during the period you have been receiving treatment," the ship replied.

  "No kidding? How much gain?"

  "Formerly your verbalization speed averaged fortytwo percent of the norm," the ship told him. "Now it is seventy-one percent of the norm."

  "Then my IQ's gone up accordingly," he said eagerly.

  "Presumably so, Mark."

  "Hey, that's great! Maybe now I can make some sense out of those reports I was trying to read—find out what's been going on!"

  "Sure," Tinker approved, "but right now let's concentrate on getting you in even better shape."

  So the sessions continued.

  Finally the point was reached where Keaflyn could look at any instant under Berina Arlan's machines without terror or flinching. He could see them, with distaste and cold dread, but he could not rid himself of them.

  "It's all up at the conscious level now," he told Tinker.

  "I can examine the whole experience from every angle. I can analyze the hell out of it. But it sticks right where it is."

  Tinker nodded gravely. "We'll end therapy here, Mark," she said. "That's all we can do."

  "Until you find a way to deal with the pleasureimpress?" he prompted.

  Tinker nodded. "Yes. Until then."

  "When will that be?"

  "I wish I knew, Mark. We have some procedures in mind that look awfully promising to us. If only we had a human subject to work with here on Rimni! Ego-fields in animal forms are so difficult to reach . . . "

  He stared at her. His high-comm ability had returned sufficiently for him to know she was leading up to something, but he could not fathom what. Unless . . . "Are you hinting that there's hope of my landing on Rimni?" he asked. "In this lifetime? What is it, Tinker?"

  "An acquaintance of yours commed me this morning," said Tinker. "She thinks she can help. Are you ready to talk to her?"

  Berina Arlan!

  The thought did not turn him to jelly, he noted gratefully, but neither did it inspire much delight. "Berina thinks she can help?" he asked dubiously.

  "Yes. The Arlan Siblings probably have more technological skills at their command than anyone else, Mark, and of course they've been working on the temporal charge problem. Berina thinks they've solved it."

  After a moment, Keaflyn nodded. "I'll talk to her."

  Chapter 17

  For some reason he had expected the Senior Sibling to be unchanged—or very slightly changed. He was surprised to observe the signs of age on her face.

  She read his look and smiled humorlessly. "This has been an excellent body, Mark," she said, "as I'm sure you'll agree. It held up beautifully, but it's seen its best days now. Another two years and I suspect Bartok will be Senior Sibling."

  He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. He guessed her body was about sixty years old, and the Arlans did not cling to bodies once the infirmities of age began to show. Come to think about it, a Neg-ridden ego-field had problems enough without trying to cope with the additional ones of a worn-out body.

  "Mark, I'm sorry," she said. "Telling you that may not help very much."

  "It doesn't," he replied in a toneless voice.

  "Well . . . to business. Our people have devised an approach for removing the temporal charge from you and your ship. This will require some special equipment that you must build yourself. We have a large volume of data to feed to your ship on that. Shall we proceed?"

  "Yeah. Go ahead. Kelly's ready to receive, aren't you, Kelly?"

  "Yes, Mark."

  "Good," said Berina. "The data's being fed. Meanwhile, I'll describe briefly what we have worked out, based on theory derived from your report on the Whorl.

  "What you've referred to as temporal charge or energy bears about as much relationship to what we think of as time as an electrostatic charge bears to, say, a magnetically-caused motion. The relationship exists, but it is not direct. The Whorl is a complex time-connected phenomenon that involves temporal charge, movement through time, and seemingly various other characteristics related to these. Perhaps the purpose of the Whorl is, as you speculated, the transferal of seed material for universes to an unimaginably distant future. Or, as some of my technicians prefer, it may be a means of thinning overmaterialized eras and thickening times of under-materialization. Which is, of course a generalization of your speculation.

  "In considering your present pr
oblem," Berina continued, "the thought occurred to Bartok that the warp spacedrive also involves the time phenomena, insofar as it circumvents relativistic time contractions at velocities many multiples the speed of light. Bartok suggested that some particular segment of the warpicle spectrum could be modulated to produce a field that would 'leak' temporal energy. After a great deal of investigation, a team of theorists working with him have concluded that's correct. The data now going into your ship's computer gives the theory and application in detail."

  Keaflyn was grinning. Of course! He would have thought of that himself if he'd had his wits at full strength! He could guess now, without being told, which segment of the warpicle spectrum was the one to be used, and the manner of using it.

  "The modulation would be a time-vibration, wouldn't it?" he asked.

  "Yes . . . time-travel, in a sense. Time would be the medium through which the modulation moved, or better, in which you and your ship would resonate."

  "And where in time would I wind up when the temporal energy was all leaked away?"

  "Here-and-now, presumably. The amplitude of your modulation would be proportional to the charge you're carrying. And since you are a forward-in-time anachronism, the range covered by your time-vibrations would be backward in time from now. In other words you would resonate between this year, 2855 and 2830."

  "And I wouldn't wind up in 2843–the midpoint of the vibratory range where I started from—when the charge was leaked away?"

  "Not according to our theory," Berina said positively.

  "The vibration doesn't damp. The amplitude stays the same; only the charge damps out. You wind up hereand-now because, despite the charge you're carrying, this is the time in which you are fixed. The data given to your ship should explain that better than I can, because I don't really comprehend some of the technical aspects of all this."

  "Never mind. I get the picture," he said, smiling with satisfaction. "It all fits together beautifully, Berina. My congratulations to Bartok and the people who worked with him on this. It'll work! I'm more confident of that than I was of the improved spacewarp before it was tested. By the way, lacking an object with a temporal charge to experiment with, I presume you haven't tested this idea."

  "No, we haven't," said Berina. "We regret that, Mark. We could run a test only by sending an unmanned ship through the Whorl, to accumulate a charge. That would require more time than you have. We realize the urgency of your situation. That's why I'm presenting the data now, untested."

  Keaflyn laughed. "Thanks for not waiting! I'll get to work on it right away."

  "Fine . . . And good luck, Mark."

  "Thanks." Keaflyn hesitated, eager to end this conversation and get to work, but feeling there was more that needed saying. He gazed at the image of the elderly woman on the screen, thinking of the pleasure and pain he had experienced from her, and of the motivation that had prompted her actions in relation to himself.

  A conservative she was—as he had been told by Lafe on Avalon, as he knew from his own experience, and also as her brother Bartok had verified. She was a preserver of what was—a resister of change until she was totally convinced the change was for the better. And she took plenty of convincing.

  A feminine trait, in a way. Women were holders; men were reachers, very loosely speaking. Thinking back to the night of the Insecurity when the weakening of the Resistant Globe had roused a mass telepathic response in the populace of the city of Bensor-on-Bensor, Keaflyn took conscious note for the first time that the most distressed and "loudest" thoughts in that flood of mental protest had come from feminine minds.

  As to Berina, not only feminine but the self-appointed champion and defender of humanity against the reductive forces of the contrauniverse . . . well, how else might he have expected her to react to such a shaking event as the Insecurity? He had to admit that now, since the passage of twelve years had convinced her the changes wrought by his stability probings had been for the best, she was working hard to heal the damage he had suffered.

  "No grudges, Berina," he said, and meant it.

  She smiled, and for an instant her face echoed the youthful beauty he remembered. "Thanks, Mark. Out."

  Feeling more himself than he had since that distantseeming morning when he had awakened at Splendisson-Terra aching with Neg-created somatics, Keaflyn dug into the job of assembling the charge-leak field generator.

  He realized his intelligence level was still below normal, though not nearly as much as it had been before Tinker's therapy. This made the job of building the generator more difficult, but he didn't mind that. Instead, he liked the challenge the chore presented.

  His Neg had not reappeared, and he guessed it was gone for good this time. It may have departed during his bout with Berina Arlan and her machines, no doubt assuming such degradation would end his stability research; if not then, his time-jumping journey through the Whorl had lost it.

  And another possibility was that, since he had achieved the research results the Neg was trying to prevent despite its interference, the Neg no longer had any reason to impinge upon him. He was, in short, no longer a key individual in the Neg-Norm conflict.

  That did not mean his stabilities research was over and done with, Keaflyn decided as he worked with the generator components. By no means! Particularly not if Tinker and Alo Felston succeeded in lifting his pleasureimpress. If they did, he could conduct his project as he originally intended to—at a leisurely, thoughtful pace over a period of two or three lifetimes.

  In any case, for the moment, the pleasure-impress was not bothering him, blanketed as it was by a deintensified shell of more recent trauma. He did not have to laugh or giggle, and the face that looked back at him from the mirror no longer wore a crazy fixed smile.

  "It occurs to me, Kelly," he said cheerfully, "that creativity is self-protective."

  "I construe that as a philosophically rather than scientifically based statement, Mark," the ship replied.

  "I'll go along with that. Just the same, take a look at my vastly improved position and the reason why it is improved. I intended to do some creative research and ran into a barrage of obstacles—but I wasn't stopped by any of them, not even when I was reduced to a backtrack intelligence level and soused to the gills!

  "And now my creativity is paying off by solving the problems I accumulated along the way. This gadget we're working on is a result of my trip through the Whorl. The helpfulness of everyone, including Berina Arlan, is motivated by appreciation of our achievements. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the results Tinker and Alo have, when they go to work on my pleasure-impress, will be favorably influenced by enhanced reality.

  "In the final analysis, I was really creating solutions to my own problems, even though that wasn't my conscious intention."

  "Your argument lacks rigor, Mark," the ship said. "One obvious flaw concerns your purpose for entering the Whorl. You stated to me earlier that you did so in search of total nonexistence, not for continuation of your research activities."

  Keaflyn laughed. "Oh, well. It was an attractive notion, whether it was true or not. Anyway, Kelly, it's going to feel very good to be a normal man again, in normal situations."

  "The events of recent weeks have confronted you with hazards to a degree the human individual tends to find overwhelming," the ship agreed.

  "And how! I've had some moments I wouldn't wish upon a Neg! But we're coming out of the tunnel now, Kelly."

  This being a statement the ship could neither verify nor deny, it remained silent.

  Out of the tunnel and into the light, mused Keaflyn. Of course, there were difficulties still to handle before he had his life back into optimum channels once more. Getting rid of his temporal charge was the first of these, and the successful completion of his ego-field therapy was second. Then the winning back of Tinker.

  But he was supremely confident these difficulties would not stop him . . . simply because he would not allow them to stop him. He sensed, in fact, that in thi
s universe of 2855—more glowing, more optimistic, more life-imbued than had been the universe of 2842—difficulties would be stopping hardly anybody!

  "In view of my limited intelligence, Kelly," he said, "you'd better check the functioning of this generator before we go into action with it. I don't think there's anything wrong with it—it comes pretty close to standard warpdrive technology with mostly standard components. But run some checks on it, just the same."

  "Okay, Mark."

  Keaflyn had a sandwich while the ship tested the generator's circuitry.

  "All characteristics are optimal, Mark," the Kelkontar reported.

  "Good." Keaflyn paused. Should he call Tinker first? No. The charge-leaking process would take only a matter of minutes in lapsed present time as well as in ship subjective time. He would call Tinker when he had the good news to tell her that he was heading down for a landing on Rimni.

  He glanced at the viewscreen. He was still on the outskirts of the Rimni system, not having moved far since the test detonation of the Plutonian asteroid.

  "This is as good a place for it as any, Kelly," he decided. "Activate the charge-leak field generator.

  "Very well. Mark."

  The feel was, as he had expected, much like going into warp or changing warp vector. The viewscreen told the main difference: the stars were not shifting across it noticeably as they did when the ship was under drive. They remained firmly in position . . .

  No . . . there was some movement of one of them. Rimni's sun was moving, but not with great rapidity.

  "We're shifting position slightly, Kelly," he remarked.

  "Yes, a certain amount of spacedrift was predicted theoretically, Mark. Our movement is parallel to the plane of the system's ecliptic and ninety-two lightminutes above it. We will not intersect the orbit of any known astronomical object."

  "That's okay, then."

  Keaflyn watched the screen as the ship's drift carried it sunward. Long before reaching a point above the center of the system, however, the direction of the drift reversed.