“Unless we were hit. Even then, there are the television screens.”
“Television screens can be switched off. I agree, though, I’m just bantering. Don’t the screens invalidate your argument, though? You can look outside on those at any time.”
“It’s not the same. It’s only a picture, not the real thing. Like looking at a photograph. That’s what gave me an idea of what it is.”
“Something psychological?” Mercer asked, quick to pick up Brian’s train of thought. “Yes, that could be it. Perhaps it makes people neurotic to have a window on the universe.”
“That’s the sort of angle.” Brian’s blue eyes shone. “A psychological effect, which ordinary people aren’t able to take. So the Scientocrats protect them even from their own curiosity. The Scientocrats know, of course, but they’re men of outstanding calibre who can be trusted and won’t crack up.”
Mercer’s face cleared. “I think you’ve hit the nail on the head,” he said in a pleased tone.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. The point is I think I can take it. I won’t go nuts. It won’t do me any harm, it would do me good. I’m that sort of person.”
Mercer laughed. “Now go and tell that to the captain.”
“He’d really co-operate, wouldn’t he?”
He leaned back. “I went for a walk towards the hull last night. I was working on a supposition. That is, the hull can’t be completely sealed. It’s always possible that the external instrumentation could break down, and in that case they’d have to take sightings through the hull, either in person or by pointing cameras through an aperture. So there must be such an aperture which can be opened in case of emergency.
“Well, there is an aperture. I’ve found it.”
Mercer felt vaguely out of his depth. “What did you see?”
“The cover’s bolted down.”
He hesitated. “There’s a wrench in my luggage.”
“Whew!” This time Mercer was surprised. “You’ve really thought this thing out, haven’t you?”
“Not really. Just call it fortuitous. But I need a look-out. Now if we go along there tonight you can keep watch while I get the bolts off.”
“Hey, hold it!” Mercer was aghast. “You can’t do that!”
“Why?”
“It’s not allowed! The regulations are very strict. You can’t mess about with the equipment of a starship!”
Brian was motionless for a bare second. Then he relaxed, laughing.
“O.K.,” he said, letting the matter drop. “What are you planning to do this afternoon?”
“I might go to the cinema.”
The ship’s cinema was the equal in size of any on Earth, and had a well-stocked library. It played a large part in the lives of most passengers during the months’ long voyages.
Seated in the darkness of the cinema, Brian fell into a contemplative mood.
Full-coloured, three-dimensional images moved across the screen. The show was a romance-adventure taking place in Southern America. Brian enjoyed it.
Even so, he felt annoyed with himself. It was ridiculous, to be gliding through interstellar space, and yet still to be engrossed in the sights and scenes to be found on Earth! Really, he supposed, the ship was a part of Earth. It was a carefully enclosed piece of the Earth environment, designed to transport passengers in perfect comfort without their ever feeling that they had left their world.
When they landed at their destination, the illusion was maintained. A planet was still a planet, no matter how weird or colourful and so it resembled Earth. The change of location did nothing to disturb their psychology. The important thing was, that they should not experience anything of another scale.
Brian felt the unreality of it. He sensed that the scientocracy found it necessary to assist in this imprisonment of the psyche, which he sought to escape.
The film ended. People rose from their seats, moved up the aisles, into the foyer, and formed chattering, laughing groups.
But for Brian the film show had not ended.
All of life took place on a cinema screen. That was what it consisted of. Everything around him, the scenes, the talk, the laughter, the walls of the ship, was an image thrown on a screen, no more substantial than a picture.
In this mood, the solidity of everything vanished for Brian. He even doubted the reality of matter. After all, how could substantiality be proved? Only by opposing one mass by another mass. A body literally did not exist until it interacted with another body.
The whole world of matter subsisted only relatively, sustaining itself by means of internal supports. It was a system of logic, consistent with itself but meaningless elsewhere.
Seen from outside, none of it existed.
Though on a grand scale, it was rather like the artificial society he saw disporting around him, whose members subsidised one another in the superficiality of their attitudes, opinions and chatter. It had no external existence. Take away that mutual support, and the fabric of their lives would vanish.
These thoughts and ideas obsessed Brian so much that, from an ordinary point of view, he doubted if he could be considered sane. But he wouldn’t let go of it. He kept reminding himself of the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s question: “Why does anything exist, and not just nothing?” This summed up exactly his own thoughts about the matter.
Under his feet, over his head, on either side of him, was absolute nothing.
None of these philosophisings were overtly connected with his desire to look outside. As far as that went, he simply had an itch to do it. The very fact that he was forbidden convinced him that it was worthwhile. So without theorising about it, he wanted to go to work with that wrench.
They left the cinema, but didn’t go immediately back to the lounge. Brian kept Mercer talking, and headed him casually in the other direction, walking aimlessly as their fashion had been years ago.
Once they passed a Scientocrat officer. Brian felt the guilty weight of the wrench which he had hung inside his jacket.
After about half an hour he stopped. “Do you know where you are?” he said.
Mercer looked around him, recalling the design of the ship which he had memorised. The corridor was smaller than average, deserted, and without doors. He had automatically noticed the change in the paint a few hundred feet back, when the corridor had switched from the luxurious to the utilitarian.
“We must be near the periphery,” he said uneasily.
Brian went a little further and motioned him to follow with a wave of his hand. “Come on.”
Mercer became nervous. “Count me out,” he said, shaking his head.
“I just want to show you something.”
Hesitantly, Mercer followed until they came to the final turning. Brian waited for him to catch up.
“There it is, look,” he whispered. “Now just stand here and tell me if anybody comes.”
Mercer backed away. “Oh, no!”
Brian chuckled light-heartedly and touched his elbow. “For the good of science, eh, old man?” He proceeded to the end of the tunnel and left Mercer standing there.
Mercer felt ridiculous. He was being forced willy-nilly into passive assistance!
At the cover-plate, Brian measured the wrench against the first bolt, adjusted the grip, and applied leverage. Reluctantly, after a lot of effort, the bolt began to turn. Paint cracked and flaked.
The first bolt came out.
Calmly he went to work on the others. It took him about ten minutes to get them all out. At the end of that time the plate was held in place only by the layers of paint joining it to the wall.
Swiftly he used a pocket-knife to cut through the paint on the perimeter of the cover, until the plate moved in his hands.
Carefully, he eased it away.
Behind it was a recess about three feet deep, ending in a perfectly transparent blister which apparently projected above the hull. He gripped the edge of the opening.
All his guesses had
been correct.
The first hint of that darkness sent a shudder throughout his whole body. Awkwardly he pulled himself into the recess and crawled towards the window blister, until he was up against the cool, nearly invisible plastic.
He looked into space.
The first direction he looked, he saw the stunning expanse of the galactic spiral edge-on, sheer coruscations of immense light. He saw the size of it, as clearly as he could have seen the size of his own hand. The spread of stars just went up, and up, and up. Here already was something so vast as to be incommensurable even with the Earth itself, so vast as to be senseless. His consciousness reeled in the first two seconds he looked at it. But even that was not what he had come for, and he turned his head to look the other way.
This direction lay beyond the galaxy. There was nothing there forever, except a few dim glimmers of other galaxies which weren’t noticed, except to accentuate the void and endlessness.
He saw at last what had so long been the subject of his search: limitless emptiness.
As he gazed, all his attention was swept into the vacuum of the awful view. From that moment he was doomed. His whole being was drawn into the empty vastness by forced attention raised to the nth degree.
The first stage was catatonia; even that was brief. His personality was being sucked into galactic space. Within a minute, his body died.
Mercer waited fretfully at the turning of the corridor. Brian had been gone some time.
He peeped along the tunnel to where the aperture was. He could see Brian’s legs poking out. For several minutes, his friend had been completely motionless and silent.
“Brian,” he called softly. “How much longer?”
No answer.
“Brian.” Then loudly, “Brian!”
Still no response. Mercer sensed that something was wrong. He stepped quickly up the tunnel and touched Brian’s leg.
It shifted limply under the pressure of his hand, and Brian made no sign that he had felt the touch. Mercer caught his breath, and wondered what to do.
Just a few more inches, and he too would have been able to peer along the recess, and out into space. But he didn’t. He backed away, in spite of the urge tugging at his mind. Soon he was running—down the tunnels, through the corridors, looking frantically for a Scientocrat officer. When he found one, he blurted out his story.
Within five minutes, he was leading a rescue party in the direction of the aperture. At least, in his ignorance he thought it was a rescue party.
He was quite mistaken.
The way the operation was tackled exploded one theory of Brian’s. Scientocrats were not allowed to look into space. The officers who removed his body from the recess and bolted the cover back in place wore all-metal helmets with television eyes which connected to a screen inside. The body was quite dead.
Mercer watched in a state of horror from the turning of the corridor. Disconsolately he followed in the wake of the stretcher as Brian’s corpse was carried away.
Head down, with his hands folded on his desk, Captain Brode meditated sombrely. He was thinking of what his passenger Brian Denver had done. He was thinking of why he had done it.
Like any other ship’s captain, he couldn’t help having occasional thoughts of out there. No Scientocrat was ever more aware of how little man could do, for all his science, to hold his own when faced with the naked universe.
More than ever he felt the abstraction, the separation from the common folk which Scientocratic Communism had thrust upon him; a separation which he sometimes regretted, but now that it was done could not avoid.
He shook his head. Just what had the experience been like for his dead passenger?
The face of God is like unto a countenance vast and terrible.
Someone knocked on the door of his office. He pressed a button, and the panel slid open.
Mercer Stone stood on the threshold.
“Come in, Mr Stone,” he said without preamble. “Please sit down.”
Mercer entered and took the proffered chair. Surreptitiously he made a study of the captain’s heavy-boned, sturdy face while the officer spent some moments placing some papers in a drawer.
Brode looked up. “Well, what can I do for you, Mr Stone?”
“I would have thought that was obvious, Captain. I want to know why my friend died.”
“He died because he broke ship’s regulations,” Brode answered heavily.
“I know that,” Mercer said shortly, though the strain of the interview was already beginning to grow in him. “In the circumstances, I hardly care about that.”
“Yes, of course.” Brode placed his hands on his desk and dropped his gaze. Mercer saw that he was genuinely sympathetic.
Brode said: “You have had a very lucky escape.”
Mercer turned several degrees paler than he already was.
“Escape—from what?”
Brode debated within himself, uncertain and disturbed. Was he going to have to tell Stone what he himself had learned only after fifteen years of special education under constant surveillance? He felt that the fellow had some right to it, and he had already checked his Citizen Dependency Rating. And yet. …
He rose.
“Are you sure you want to know?” he asked, trying to drive the question home.
“No,” said Mercer after a moment. “I feel torn. But after that. …” He tailed off.
“If you insist, I will admit you into the secret, since you already know part of it.”
Mercer nodded.
Captain Brode turned and took a heavy, black leather-bound volume from a shelf: The Table of Physical Constants. Letting Mercer see the gold-lettered title, he placed it on the desk.
Understanding, Mercer placed his hand upon it.
“Do you swear by All that exists to communicate to no person what you are about to learn?” the captain intoned.
“I so swear.”
The captain replaced the book on its shelf. He turned to face Stone again, feeling slightly embarrassed about what he had to say.
“The simple fact is,” he began, “that any man who looks into space immediately dies.”
Since the hideous event at the aperture, Mercer had been feeling his mental world begin to revolve upside-down. Now he felt a premonition of something that was the complete inversion of the world-picture he had always carried with him. He tried to look straight into the captain’s steady, comforting face.
“But how?”
“That is the part we do not know. In fact, it only is known partly. We think it is because he sees the universe too nakedly, too incomprehensibly vast. He loses himself in it, and his consciousness is whisked away into space like a fly would be if we opened the main port.
“As for the technicality of it, we’re not sure Probably he loses his point of reference.”
“No one ever came to harm in interplanetary flights,” Mercer pointed out.
Brode nodded. “For some reason it doesn’t happen inside a solar system. Something to do with the sun: it provides a mental anchor. That’s what I meant by a point of reference. Once you get out there—make no mistake, there’s nothing to hang on to. You’re lost. Nowhere to go, and if there were anywhere, nowhere to start from.”
There went the second half of Brian’s theory, Mercer thought. The ruling was not a jealous monopoly on the part of the Scientocrats. It was a sacred trust. “It frightens me,” he muttered.
Captain Brode looked hard at the pale, worried face of Mercer Stone. “Space does it,” he said. “There’s too much of it out there. It would swallow us all, swallow any number, without making any difference. It’s the worst possible way to die.”
He turned away. His voice dropped. “But you know, I don’t think it’s worth dying any other way.”
Life Trap
Although we of the Temple of Mysteries have devoted our energies to the pursuit of life’s secrets, it has never been guaranteed that what we may learn will be in any way pleasant, or conducive to ou
r peace of mind. What becomes known cannot be made unknown, until death intervenes, and all seekers after hidden knowledge run the risk of finding that ignorance was after all the happier state.
The experiment was conducted at midnight, this being the hour when the subject, by his own account, customarily knows greatest clarity of mind. This subject was in fact my good friend Marcus, Aspirant of the Third Grade of the Arcanum—the highest rank our hierarchy affords, entitling him, when the occasion arises, to wear the mantle of High Priest. The mixture had been prepared earlier in the day, and was a combination of ether, poppy, a certain mushroom, and other consciousness-altering drugs, all substances which, when taken singly or in various simpler compounds, produced effects already well known to us from our years of investigative labour. Never before, however, had we designed a concoction for so ambitious or so hazardous a purpose: to take the mind, while still fully conscious, beyond the point of death, and after an interval to return it to the living world.
Vainly I had begged Marcus to be less precipitous; to test the compound beforehand, possibly using partial samples on a candidate acolyte. But Marcus, adamant that nothing less than the full dose would be effective, consented only to test it on a dog belonging to our drug expert, Lucius the apothecary. When forced to inhale the fumes the animal became rigid and appeared to be dead for the space of about an hour. After this it quickly recovered, but for a further hour it showed some nervousness, barking and cringing when anyone came near. Eventually this, too, wore off, and Marcus announced that the symptoms were as would be expected.
On the appointed night Marcus and I were alone in the Temple, the others having left at Marcus’s own request. In the changing room I helped him into a robe of crisp clean linen on which the emblem of the Temple was sewn. Then, for a period, we sat together, while the water-clock dripped away the moments. We said little, for all aspects of the enterprise had already been thoroughly discussed.
The Seed of Evil Page 14
