"The ghost of a machine?" demanded Thorne incredulously.
His wife, looking at an instrument she had taken from her bag, said, "The graph shows a sudden dip in temperature . . ."
"But a machine?" repeated the scientist.
"Why not?" countered Grimes. "Life force rubs off human beings on to the machinery with which they're in the most intimate contact. Ships, especially . . . And a car is, in some ways, almost a miniature ship . . ." He turned to Mayhew. "Ken?"
The telepath replied, in a distant voice, "I . . . I feel . . . resentment . . . In its dim, mechanical way that thing loved its mistress. It was abandoned, left here to rot . . ."
"Did you see anything?" persisted Thorne.
"I saw the same as George did," admitted Mayhew. "But I knew it wasn't . . . real."
We resumed our trudge along the overgrown street. Everybody, I noticed with a certain wry satisfaction, gave the abandoned car a wide berth. We walked on, and on, trying to ignore the brambly growths that clutched at our trouser legs as though with malign intent.
"Here," announced Mayhew.
We could just make out the entrance to a side alley, completely blocked with a tall, bamboo-like growth with tangled strands of ivy filling the narrow spaces between the upright stems.
"Shall I?" asked Sonya.
"Yes," said Grimes, after a second's thought.
While Sara watched enviously the commodore's wife used her laser pistol like a machete, slashing with the almost invisible beam. There were crackling flames and billows of dense white smoke. Coughing and spluttering, with eyes watering, we backed away. I couldn't help thinking that a fire extinguisher would have been more useful than most of the other equipment we had brought along.
But only the bamboo burned; the surrounding ivy was too green to catch fire once the laser was no longer in use. At last the smoke cleared to a barely tolerable level and we were able to make our way forward. The embers were hot underfoot, nonetheless, but our boots were stout and the fabric of our trousers fireproof.
We found the church.
It was only a small building, standing apart from its taller neighbours. It was a featureless cube. Well, almost a cube. I got the impression that the angles were subtly, very subtly, wrong. Unlike the buildings to either side of it it was not overgrown. Its dull grey walls seemed to be of some synthetic stone. The plain rectangular door was also grey, possibly of uncorroded metal. There were no windows. Over the entrance, in black lettering, were the words, TEMPLE OF THE PRINCIPLE.
Grimes stared at the squat, ugly building. I could see from his face that he was far from happy. He muttered, "This is where we came in."
"This," Sonya corrected him, "is where we nearly went out . . ."
They had told me the story during the outward passage. I knew how they had investigated this odd temple, and found themselves thrown into an alternate existence, another plane of being on which their lives had taken altogether different courses. It had not been a dream, they insisted. They had actually lived those lives.
"Something . . ." Mayhew was muttering. "Something . . . But what? But what?"
"And what was the principle that they . . . er . . . worshipped?" asked Thorne, matter-of-factly.
"The Uncertainty Principle . . ." said Grimes, but dubiously. "You know, the funny part is that in none of the records of the abandoned colony is there any mention of this temple, or of the religion with which it was associated."
"The worshippers must have . . . left," Sonya said, "before the other colonists were evacuated."
"But where did they go?" asked Thorne.
"Or when," said Mayhew. "To when, I mean."
Grimes filled and lit his pipe, then almost immediately knocked it out again, put it back in his pocket. He pushed the door. I was expecting it to resist his applied pressure but it opened easily, far too easily. He led the way inside the temple. The others followed. I was last, as I waited until I had raised Bindle on my personal transceiver to tell him where we were and what we doing. He—always the humorist—said, "Drop something in the plate for me, Captain!"
I was expecting darkness in the huge, windowless room, but there was light—of a sort. The grey, subtly shifting twilight was worse than blackness would have been. It accentuated the . . . the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. I was reminded of that eerie sensation one feels in the interstellar drive room of a ship when the Mannschenn Drive is running, the dim perception of planes at right angles to all the planes of the normal Space-Time continuum. Faintly self-luminous, not quite in the middle of that uncannily lopsided hall, was what had to be the altar, a sort of ominous coffin shape. But as I stared at it its planes and angles shifted. It was, I decided, more of a cube. Or more than a cube . . . A tesseract?
Rose Thorne was pulling instruments out of her capacious bag. She set one of them up on spidery, telescopic legs. She peered at the dial on top of it. "Fluctuations," she murmured, "slight, but definite . . ." She said in a louder voice, "There's something odd about the gravitational field of this place . . ."
"Gravity waves?" asked her husband.
She laughed briefly. "Ripples rather than waves. Undetectable by any normal gravitometer."
Thorne turned to Grimes. "Did you notice any phenomena like this when you were here before, John?"
"We didn't have any instruments with us," the commodore told him shortly.
"And what do you feel Ken?" the scientist asked Mayhew.
But the telepath did not reply.
Looking at him, the way that he was standing there, his gaze somehow turned inward, I was reminded of the uneasy sensation you get when a dog sees something—or seems to see something—that is invisible to you. "Old . . ." he whispered. "Old . . . From the time before this, and from the time before that, and the time before and the time before . . . The planet alive, alive and aware, a sentient world . . . Surviving every death and rebirth of the universe . . . Surviving beyond the continuum . . ."
It didn't make sense, I thought. It didn't make sense.
Or did it?
His lips moved again, but his voice was barely audible. "Communion . . . Yes. Communion . . ." He took a step, and then another, and another, like a sleepwalker. He paced slowly and deliberately up to—into—the dimly glowing tesseract. He seemed to flicker. The outline of his body wavered, wavered and faded. Then, quite suddenly, he was gone.
The metallic click as Sara cocked her sub-machine gun was startlingly loud. I still don't know what she thought that she was going to shoot at. I did know that in this situation all our weapons were utterly useless.
"We have to get Clarisse here," said Grimes at last. "She's the only one of us who'll be able to do anything." He added, in a whisper, "If anything can be done, that is . . ."
* * *
We had to go outside the temple before we could use our personal transceivers. Clarisse was already calling; she knew, of course. She was already in Basset's second boat, which was being piloted by young Taylor. Grimes told him to try to land in the street just by the mouth of the alley. There were more obstructions there than where we had set down, in the square, but speed was the prime consideration. I walked, accompanied by Sara, to the proposed landing site, my transceiver set for continuous beacon-transmission so that Taylor could home on it.
We heard the boat—the inertial drive is not famous for quiet running—before we saw it. Taylor came in low over the rooftops, wasting no time. He slammed the lifecraft down to the road surface, crushing a couple of well-developed bushes and knocking a stout sapling sideways. I shuddered. I didn't like to see ship's equipment—especially my ship's equipment—handled that way. The door midway along the torpedo-shaped hull snapped open. Clarisse jumped out.
She brushed past us, unspeaking, ran into the alley, clouds of fine ash exploding about her ankles. Sara and I followed her. Clarisse hesitated briefly at the temple doorway, exchanging a few words with Grimes and Sonya, then hurried inside. When the rest of us j
oined her we found her standing by the altar, motionless, her face set and expressionless. In the dim light she looked like a priestess of some ancient religion.
Then she spoke, but not to any of us.
"Ken," she whispered, obviously vocalising her thoughts. "Ken . . ." She smiled suddenly. She was getting through. "Yes . . . Here I am . . ."
"Where is he?" demanded Grimes urgently.
She ignored the question. Suddenly, walking as Mayhew had walked, she stepped into that luminous shape, that distorted geometrical, multi-dimensional diagram. We saw the outline of her body through her clothing, her shadowy bone structure through her translucent flesh, and . . .
Nothing.
Thorne broke the stunned silence. "Did you observe the meter while all this was happening?" he asked his wife.
You cold blooded bastard! I thought angrily, then realised that the scientists' instruments might provide some clue as to what had happened.
"No," she admitted, then stooped over the gravitometer, pressed a button. "But here's the print-out."
We could all see the graph as she showed it to him. There were the slight, very slight irregularities that she had referred to as gravitational ripples. And there were two sharp and very definite dips. The first one must have registered when Mayhew disappeared, the second when Clarisse vanished.
So It, whatever It was, played around with gravity. A sentient planet, I reflected, ought to be able to do just that . . .
"Rose," said Grimes, "watch your gravitometer, will you?"
She shot him a puzzled look, but obeyed. The commodore brought something small out of his pocket. It was, I saw, a box of matches. He tossed it towards the tesseract. Nobody was surprised when it, too, vanished.
"The field intensified," reported the woman. "Briefly, slightly, but very definitely."
"So . . ." murmured Grimes. "So what?" He turned to face us all. "We must get Ken and Clarisse out. But how?"
Nobody answered him.
Having waited in vain for a reply he continued. "Twice, while on this blasted planet, I've been shunted . . . elsewhere. Each time I got hack. I still don't know how. But if I could, they can." He gestured towards the altar. "That thing's a gateway. A gateway to where—or when?" He addressed me directly. "You've an engineroom gantry aboard your ship, George. And there are drilling and cutting tools in the engineers' workshop."
"Yes," I told him.
"I'd like them here. Mphm. But there'll be only a few metres of wire on your gantry winches. We could want more, much more . . ."
I remembered, then, something which had been a source of puzzlement to me for a long time. "In the storeroom," I told him, "are two funny little hand winches, with reels of very fine wire. There's a lot of wire. Nobody knows what those winches are for. But . . ."
"But they might come in handy now," said Grimes, suddenly and inexplicably cheerful. "I think I know what those winches are—although what they're doing aboard a merchant spaceship is a mystery. In the Survey Service, of course, we had things like them, for oceanographical work . . ."
"Your're losing me, sir," I said.
"I could be wrong, of course," he went on, "but I've a hunch that these will be just the things we need. I'd like one of them out here at once. The other one, I think, could be modified slightly. Your engineers can study the simple workings of it, and then fit it with a motor from your gantry . . ."
I suppose that he knew what he was talking about. Nobody else did.
We went outside the temple to use our transceivers to get in touch with Bindle, back aboard the ship. Grimes put him in the picture and then gave him detailed instructions. As well as the first of the odd little hand winches and the cutting tools he wanted a sound-powered telephone, with as much wire as could be found.
Then the commodore and myself went to the mouth of the alley to await the return of Taylor with the first installment of equipment. The boat came in at last and we boarded it at once and were promptly carried to the flat roof of the building. Under my watchful eye the Third Officer made a very cautious landing—but that rooftop, by the feel of it, could have supported the enormous weight of an Alpha Class liner. We unloaded the tools and the reel of wire, then Taylor lifted off and returned to the ship.
Grimes looked at the wire reel and laughed. He said, "And you really don't know what this is, George?"
"No," I told him.
"Was your ship ever on Atlantia?"
"A few times, I think, but never when I was in her."
"And one of those times—probably the last time—she overcarried cargo," went on Grimes. "And the good Dog Star Line Mate buried those left-over bones in the back garden, thinking that they might come in handy for something, some time. This is a sounding machine, such as the Atlanteans use in their big schooners, and such as we, in the Survey Service, use for charting the seas of a newly discovered world. But our machines have motors."
"I thought that all sounding was done electronically," I said.
"Most of it is," the commodore told me, "but an echometer can't bring up a sample of the bottom. . . Yes, this is a sounding machine, Armstrong Patent."
"Is that the make of it?", Grimes laughed again, obviously, amused by my ignorance. I rather resented this. It was all very well for him; he was one of the experts, if not the expert, on Terran maritime history. And not only that, he holds a Master Mariner's Certificate in addition to his qualifications as a Master Astronaut—he had actually sailed in command of a surface vessel on that watery world Aquarius.
"Armstrong Patent," he said, "is the nickname given by seamen to any piece of machinery powered by human muscle. And they're a weird mob, the Atlanteans, as you may know. They have a horror of automation even in its simplest forms. They pride themselves on having put the clock back to the good old days of wooden ships and iron men. But they do import some manufactured goods—such as this." He looked at the dial set horizontally on top of the winch. "And then two hundred fathoms of piano wire here. That's about three hundred and sixty five metres." He pulled a cylinder of heavy metal from its clip on the winch frame. "And here's the sinker. About ten kilograms of lead, by the feel of it."
"Oh, I see," I admitted. (Well, I did, after a fashion.)
"Mphm." Grimes was studying the legs on which the machine stood, the feet of which were designed so that they could be bolted to a deck. "Mphm . . ." He straightened up, then walked to the edge of the flat roof. I followed him. There was no parapet. I stayed well back; I don't suffer from acrophobia—I'd hardly be a spaceman if I did—but I always like to have something to hold on to. And it looked a long way down. The temple hadn't looked all that high from the ground, but in its vicinity perspective seemed to be following a new set of rules.
Grimes was shouting down to his wife after a futile attempt to use his personal transceiver. Apparently the inhibitory field was as effective on the roof as inside the building. "Sonya, we want some timber. Yes, timber! Two good, strong logs, straight, each at lost two metres long and fifteen centimetres thick . . . Yes, Use your laser to cut them!"
When she had gone, accompanied by the others, he determined the centre of the flat roof by pacing out the diagonals. Where these intersected he put down his precious pipe as a marker. I brought him the laser cutter—one with a self contained power pack. He held it like the oversized pistol that it resembled, directing the thin pencil of incandescence almost directly downward.
At first it seemed the surface of the roof was going to be impossible to cut; the beam flattened weirdly at the point of impact, spreading to a tiny puddle of intense light, dazzlingly bright even though it was in the full rays of the sun. And then, quite suddenly, without any pyrotechnics, without so much as a wisp of smoke, there was penetration.
After that it was easy. Grimes described a circle of about one metre diameter but left a thirty degree arc uncut. He switched off and put down the cutter, then retrieved his pipe. When it was safely back in his pocket he extended a cautious fingertip to the cut in the r
oof. He looked puzzled. "Cold, stone cold," he whispered. "It shouldn't be. But it saves time."
I fetched the pinch bar and we got one end of it under the partially excised circle, then levered upwards. It came fairly easily, and did not spring back when the pressure was released. I took a firm hold on the smooth edge and held it while Grimes completed the cut.
When the disc was free it was amazingly light, even though it was all of four centimeters thick. I put it to one side and we looked down.
The altar—I may as well go on calling it that, although I was sure by now that it had no religious significance—was almost directly below us. Its alien geometry glimmered wanly. I'd been expecting, somehow, to find myself looking down into a hole, a very deep hole, but such was not the case. It was just as we had seen it from ground level, a distorted construct of slowly shifting planes of dim radiance. But we knew that if we fell into it we should keep on going.
Catch the Star Winds Page 27
