A Glimpse of Infinity

by Brian Stableford

  “There is no way to protect your mind against invasion,” said Sisyr, “and the Underworld cannot be destroyed.”

  “Your civilization is a good deal more advanced than ours,” said Heres.

  “Your concept of advance has no meaning,” Sisyr stated flatly.

  “Your technology, then,” persisted the Hegemon. “You have the technology to achieve things we cannot.”

  “We are different,” said the alien.

  “You can do things we cannot.”

  “Yes. But we are not miracle-workers. We cannot do everything.”

  “I think you’re lying,” said Heres. “I think that you know the means to destroy the Underworld, but that you will not help us.”

  “There is no way,” said Sisyr, “but I will not help you in the attempt.”

  “What would you have us do?” broke in Spiro. “You say that we cannot protect ourselves. What can we do but fight? We have no alternative.”

  Sisyr made no answer.

  Heres began to speak again, but Dascon cut him off. “Wait,” he said. “Let us try to be clear about one thing. When this...shall we call it a mental invasion?...occurred, did you experience anything?”

  “Yes,” said Sisyr.

  “You were too far away,” said Heres. “It can hardly have had any effect at all.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Dascon, quickly, “you did experience something. A touch, perhaps, and no more—but something. Perhaps we can assume that what you experienced was not so very different from what some of us experienced. May I ask how you reacted to that experience? I ask this because it seems to me that we are talking at cross-purposes. What happened to us frightened us very badly. We feel the need to act quickly and definitely. But you, apparently, do not feel the same way. Why not? Perhaps you have known things like this before. Perhaps you simply do not understand the character of our reaction.”

  “Perhaps,” said Sisyr. “Almost certainly. I cannot feel as you feel. But how can I begin to explain how I feel? There is no way.”

  “We have concepts in common,” said Dascon. “You can use our language. Its words must have meaning for you. Tell us, in words, what the experience meant to you. Did it frighten you?”

  “No.”

  “Surprise, then? Were you startled?”

  “No.”

  “You were expecting something of the kind?”

  “It was unexpected. But I was not surprised.”

  “Then you have felt something like it before. Before you came to Earth. Something similar has happened to you in the past?”

  Sisyr paused before answering. Finally, he said: “Similar...perhaps. But not the same. The nature of the force involved was known to me. The precise nature of the manifestation was not.”

  Dascon rapped the table with his clenched fist. “At last,” he said, “we begin to get somewhere. You know the nature of the force involved. Do you know how it was generated?”

  “An aberration in space. Perhaps you would call it a knot, or a lesion. The physical nature of the event I am familiar with, even if I do not understand it as some of my race might. But what it means in terms of your minds—that I cannot know. I do not know how you can isolate yourselves from another such occurrence. I do not believe that there is any way that you could. How can you shield yourselves against the force of gravity? There is no way.”

  Dascon looked sideways at Heres, and shrugged.

  “If what you say is true,” said Heres, “then we have no alternative but to destroy the sources, or potential sources, of this force. We must destroy the Underworld. Can you see the logic of that?”

  “Your logic, perhaps,” said Sisyr. “Not mine.”

  “You ask us to do nothing. To hope that the thing will not occur again, or—if it does—to suffer it. To have our minds destroyed.”

  “Perhaps it is not destruction,” said the alien.

  “What does that mean?” demanded Spiro.

  “I do not know what it means—to you. You cannot know what it means to me. If you wish, I will try to explain.”

  “There is no time,” said Heres. “We do not want explanation. We want help. We demand help. You say the Underworld cannot be destroyed, but we know that is not so. In time, we could do it. But we do not have the time available to us. We need the aid of your technology to speed up the task. You must tell us how to make our methods more efficient, how to make equipment which will do the job more quickly. All we want from you now is the same help that you gave our ancestors. We want you to improve our means of production, refine our methods. Simply help us in the task we have set ourselves. You owe us this.”

  Sisyr shook his head deliberately. The mimicking of the human gesture seemed to Heres somehow profane.

  “We can compel you!” he said, anger flooding his voice.

  To this, Sisyr said nothing.

  Heres half-rose from his chair. “You don’t die,” he said, harshly. “But we can kill you. Are you immune to pain? We have the power to force you. You must see that.”

  Dascon had seen this coming, but Spiro, strangely enough, had not. It was Spiro who had become angry along with Heres, but as Heres threatened the alien it was Spiro who recoiled, who began suddenly to sweat. It was Spiro who was nauseated.

  Sisyr’s pale blue eyes stared steadily into Heres’ gray ones.

  “You could kill me,” conceded the alien. “Though you would not find it easy. I am not immune to pain. But you cannot use either the threat of death or the administration of pain to force me to go against my will. It cannot be done.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Heres.

  “It is so,” replied Sisyr. “I am immortal—at least potentially. I endure. I feel pain, but if necessary I can endure pain. Forever, if necessary. That is what immortality means. I can be killed, if every cell in my body is destroyed, but I am not afraid of being killed. One is only afraid of the inevitable. You must understand that I am not like you. You cannot force me to do anything. No matter what you may do.”

  Heres became suddenly conscious that his hands were trembling. He could not control them. He realized then that he did believe the alien: that he was convinced of his own helplessness.

  21.

  The driver brought the truck to a halt some twenty feet short of the bridge. Germont raised himself to as high a vantage as the canopy would permit, and looked carefully all around. There was no sign of life.

  There was, in fact, no apparent need for suspicion at all. Thus far, in moving into the heart of the inhabited country, Germont’s expeditionary force had met with no hostility whatsoever. The crop-spraying had proceeded unhindered at five townships. There had been no outwardly aggressive action on either side. Now, for the first time, the rough road of the Children of the Voice had led them to a waterway too wide for the vehicles to cross. There was a bridge, but a bridge built by the Shaira for their own use. It did not look as if it would take the weight of one of the armored cars, and there was no reason to suppose that it would. Somewhere back in the convoy there was equipment capable of erecting a bridge from scratch, or—if it proved more convenient—strengthening the structure that was there already. But for the first time the party would be obliged to stop for a moderate period of time while its personnel were working outside, unprotected by armor plate, in what was theoretically enemy territory.

  “If they’ve only been waiting their chance,” said the driver dourly, “this is it.”

  Germont spared him a sour glance.

  The river flowed at the bottom of a valley. It was not deep, but it was deep enough for the slopes on either side to be difficult ground on which to maneuver. Germont could see no more than a mile in any direction—considerably less in the direction they had come, where the slope was steepest and the top of the hill closest. The slopes were covered with matted vegetation rather like bracken, with occasional tall clumps of quasi-dendrites. The whole aspect of the plant life here seemed different from the weird conglomerate forests of the darkland
s and the moist confusion of the Waste away to the north. Here, the general appearance the vegetation was much closer to moorland and heath. Only on close inspection were the basic structures of the environment revealed to be alien.

  Germont sent one truck back to the crest of the hill, and instructed its commander to keep scanning with the searchlight. Then he moved his own vehicle off the road while those carrying the pontoons and hawsers came to the fore. He sent men out to both left and right, telling them to hold fixed positions and signal to one another at regular intervals. A third party went across the bridge.

  To demonstrate his faith in the invulnerability of his force he got out himself—the first time he had done so since he had seen the doctor shot on the road of stars—to supervise the operation.

  He walked out on to the wooden bridge, where the man in charge of the pontoon team, Gunn Spurner, was already inspecting the possibilities. As he set foot—somewhat gingerly—on the native structure, he heard Spurner giving orders to his men, waving them off the bridge and away to the left. He directed them primarily with gestures. They moved quickly—perhaps a little too quickly, keen to play out their parts and put on a show of efficiency. As Germont drew level with Spurner the noise of the drills was already beginning.

  “No good?” said Germont, pointing down at the bridge.

  Spurner shrugged. “Good enough,” he said. “Not really wide enough. It’s easier to start from scratch. If we used this one, we’d only smash it up. Wouldn’t be much use the next time.”

  “Next time?”

  “When we come back.”

  Germont shook his head. “We’ll go straight through to another exit,” he said. “If necessary, they’ll take the men up and abandon the vehicles. We aren’t going back.”

  There was a moment’s silence, while they reflected on the meanings implicit in the statement.

  “Do you know what happened to the Deltas?” asked Spurner, quietly. His voice was flat and apparently unconcerned.

  “Not yet,” said Germont.

  Another silence inevitably followed this statement. Germont moved to the edge of the bridge, now convinced that the structure was secure, and looked down into the water. It was flowing so slowly that its movement was hardly detectable. The water was murky and carried a heavy, oily scum.

  “Foul,” he commented. “I wonder why.”

  “Effluent?” suggested Spurner.

  “I don’t think so. We don’t expel waste in this area, or anywhere upriver.”

  “The water must be ours,” Spurner pointed out. “It doesn’t rain here. Not ever. If it weren’t for our water management there wouldn’t be any life here at all. If we only tipped it all straight back into the sea this place would have been desert thousands of years ago.”

  “It’s not as easy as that,” said Germont. “We can only exert a certain amount of control over the water flow. We don’t rule the rainfall. And even if we could...enough would get through. There’d always be enough. We could poison a lot of the water as it passed through the ducts in the platform on its way down here...but there’d still be enough. Enough water, not enough poison. The blight is the best way. The quickest way.”

  As he spoke, Germont moved along the bridge, still looking down at the water. He was tempted to reach down and dangle his gloved hand in the turbid liquid, testing its texture, but he dared not. He wondered vaguely whether there was anything alive in there. Obviously, by the way the water flowed turgidly and glutinously, there was a great deal of weed, but were there fish? Or crocodiles? He breathed deeply, trying to suck the air through his filter-mask in larger, more satisfying drafts. It felt good to be walking again, unconfined by the steel walls, able to stand up straight. After the first moments had passed, he no longer felt exposed, fearful of what might happen at any moment. He no longer anticipated the whiplash movement of an arrow, the cry of shock and pain that had barely escaped the doctor’s lips before he died. This was a different environment—starlit, and far less eerie.

  He turned to look back, to look at Spurner, still standing some five or six yards away on the bridge, to watch the men working with enthusiastic patience to get hawsers slung across the river and the pontoon units strung out to provide a road for the armored cars. He looked up at the slopes, and waited for the occasional, unsteady winking of the lights by which the soldiers signaled to one another that all was well.

  He was suddenly struck by the oddness of the protective garments which the men wore. Here, where the stars were clustered and the light well-scattered, the suits tended to glint and gleam as the men inside them moved. The plastic was not really shiny, but it was smooth enough to reflect, almost in the same way that the silvery scum on the river reflected as slow, tedious ripples wound their way away from the bank where the men were working. Once, Germont had seen film of men walking on the moon, in thick, shiny suits. His own men wore filters instead of vast domed helmets, and their suits hung slack because there was no excess pressure inside, but there was something of the same quality about their aspect and appearance.

  We might as well be on the moon, he thought. Or Mars...or a world of another star. The air here is our air, and the water is the waste from our world. Nevertheless, we are aliens. We come wrapped up in our fragments of the real world—the world above. We dare not face this world on its own terms.

  He had to back off to let men carrying the hawsers pass him, to begin work on the far bank. Spurner joined him again, and they stood together watching the work proceed.

  “Looks like everything’s all right,” commented Spurner.

  “Of course,” agreed Germont, sounding and feeling anything but completely sure of himself.

  “They seem to be scared to death of us,” went on the other man. “They daren’t come near. What do you think they see us as? Gods from the sky? A supernatural visitation? They’re bound to blame us for the blight, but they may take it philosophically—an act of fate over which they have no possible control.”

  Germont felt suddenly angry. “Have you looked at them?” he demanded. “While we cut slowly through their fields, they stand on their walls and watch us. Have you watched them? Do they seem to you like people in the presence of their gods or their demons? They look to me as if they know exactly what we are. They know what they’re doing, and they know why. And I’m scared because I think they can stop us any time they like. We have the fire-power and the armor, but if they wanted to they could stop us dead in our tracks. I think they’re going to kill us all.”

  Spurner recoiled. Not only did he make no reply, but he searched his mind assiduously for a way to change the subject. This was not something he cared to think about.

  Germont did not wait for him to find something to say. Instead, he went back across the bridge to his own vehicle, and swung himself back inside.

  “I want six men,” he said. “You three will do for a start. Pick up three from Alpha-two. Follow the road beyond the bridge for a couple of miles. I want to know what’s there. Get back here in an hour. You’ll have to move fast, but be careful. Now!”

  The three men he had addressed were already suited and their weapons were beside them. They were reluctant to move out, and rather surprised that they had been ordered to, but they put their masks on hurriedly. Germont went forward to the cockpit. The driver looked at him critically.

  “Sending men forward on foot is a bit dangerous, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Once we’re across that river,” said Germont, “we’ll take up the hawsers and the pontoons for the next time. That means we can’t get back across in a hurry. If they’re waiting for us, they’ll be just beyond that hill. And they’ll be waiting for us to cut off our own retreat.”

  “And suppose that they are?” said the driver. “What then? Do we stay this side and run?”

  “I wish we could,” said Germont, in a low voice. “I really wish we could.”

  22.

  Enzo Ulicon looked carefully at the image of Vicente Soron which presente
d itself to him on the screen.

  “You look ill,” he said.

  “I am ill,” said Soron. “It was the Underworld.”

  “Not an infection?”

  “Oh, no. We can deal very easily with any infection picked up down there. It’s not organic. It’s just...general debility. Being down there for any period of time simply drains the life out of you. I just couldn’t stand it any longer...not the second time. The doctor says that it’s psychosomatic—that I’m thinking myself ill. But that doesn’t make it any the less real. And when I found out about the corrosion...the shock.”

  “Yes,” said Ulicon, feeling that further discussion of Soron’s state of health was rather pointless. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I thought that I’d take advantage of your recall to go over the matter of the creature’s disappearance. We still can’t piece together a reasonable account of what happened and why. I’m convinced that we’ve missed something and I’m trying to find out what it is.”

  “I’ve reported absolutely everything,” Soron said. “I really don’t want to discuss that any more. I’d rather be left alone. I’m bitterly regretting that I was involved in that particular incident.”

  “Please, Vicente,” said Ulicon. “This is important.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know exactly what was administered to the creature. Some circumstance arising as a result of your handling of it allowed it to perform that disappearing act. So far as we know this is a unique event. It never happened before and it hasn’t happened since. I must know exactly what you gave that creature.”

  “I made a list,” said Soron, tiredly. “It’s all there. I gave it a dose of the same anesthetic that was in the dart gun when it began to show signs of life, and I continued to shoot it full of the stuff as the dose continually wore off. The drug is a mixture, but all the constituents are fairly commonplace. We had nothing to feed it, so I administered intravenous shots of glucose. I also gave it some shots of ferric tartrate and phenylalanine to compensate for some of the metabolic side effects of the sedatives.”