“I told him that. He says that maybe he has ‘the natural suspicion of youth for age’ but that she has the ‘intolerable arrogance of unquestioned authority.’ According to Sy, she’s surrounded by yes-men and yes-women, and she thinks she knows all the answers.”
“When in fact, he does?” Peron was irritated. He was still slightly jealous of Sy — particularly when Elissa sounded admiring.
“No. He says he has a hundred unanswered questions, but he didn’t want to go into them with Gibbs. He’s waiting for a shot at Judith Niles.”
“So am I. But there’s really only one question to be asked. Why does Gulf City exist?”
“You heard what Wolfgang said: to study the Kermel Objects.”
“Sure — but that’s nonsense.” Peron rolled over to face Elissa. “Look, I can imagine a group of pure scientists arguing that it was worth the enormous effort of setting up a research station out here in the Gulf, to decide the nature of the Kermel Objects. But you’ve met Judith Niles. Can you see her swallowing that argument? She’d throw them out of her office in two minutes. I think Sy will ask her the main question — and rather him than me. But if he doesn’t, you and I must do it.”
Peron sounded unhappy but resolute. Elissa said no more, but she snuggled closer to him and took him in her arms.
* * *
Almost a mile away, in a secluded area on the other side of Gulf City, Wolfgang Gibbs was engaged in his own secret meeting with Charlene Bloom. They lay side by side in an empty room, in darkness and with all monitors turned off. “You noticed the difference, didn’t you?” he said softly. “I think we caught a new breed of fish this time. Sharks, maybe, instead of guppies.”
“I agree. JN certainly thinks so, too. You could feel the tension between all four of them. Especially with the dark-haired kid — he didn’t give her an inch. I’m not sure I want to be at the next meeting. She’ll have her hands full.” “I sure as hell hope so.” Wolfgang Gibbs smiled bitterly in the darkness. “You know the trouble with the two of us, Charlene? We’re outgunned. JN’s the boss, and we know it, all three. We just can’t argue with her, even when we’re on the right side of the issue. She has too much firepower. I’m sick of this place, and I’m beginning to hate S-space life, but I still can’t tell her I want out.” “You mean leave? Leave Gulf City and JN completely?” Charlene Bloom pulled away from him. “We couldn’t do that. We’ve all been together since the beginning.” “Yeah. And that’s too long. Over fifteen years, most of them in S-space. God, Charlene, don’t you think we need a new look at things here? And I don’t believe we can provide it. Maybe those three kids can. You and I should be off, out to pasture, running a planet contact group or a Sector Headquarters. Maybe we should go to Pentecost, where they came from.”
“Did you tell them about their three friends?”
Gibbs scowled and shook his head. “Not yet. I couldn’t do it. They’re expecting them to roll up here at Gulf City. I’m leaving it to JN to break the news. They’ll hear it soon enough. That’s going to be hard for them.”
There was a long silence.
“Wolfgang?” said Charlene at last.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry you feel the way you do.” Her voice was unhappy and tentative. “I know it’s frustrating here, sometimes. But I’ve been very happy, all these years. I know my limitations. I could never have done what Judith has done, pulling us together and holding us together. Nor could you. And you can say what you like about living in Gulf City, but we’re working on humanity’s biggest problem. If we don’t find a solution, it’s the end of the road for homo sapiens. And if you’re making a sacrifice, JN is making one that’s just as big.” “I know it. But she’s calling the shots. Suppose we’re off on the wrong tack? JN thinks we’re making progress, but as far as I’m concerned we’re in just the same position as when Gulf City was created — that’s over fifteen thousand Earth-years ago. What have we accomplished in all that time? And how long do we have, before it’s all over?”
Charlene did not reply. Wolfgang had sometimes spoken of breaking away from Gulf City, but never before in such strong terms. If he went, what would she do? She could not bear to lose Wolfgang, but also she could not desert her work and Judith Niles.
She was glad of the darkness. And she was more than ever dreading the results of the coming meeting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sy hesitated for maybe a minute after leaving Peron and Elissa. Then he moved fast. During their tour of Gulf City they had seen a dozen suspense chambers for movement to and from S-space. Now he headed for the nearest of them and unhesitatingly lowered himself inside one of the tanks. He performed a final check of the monitors to confirm that he was alone and unobserved, then lay back in the casket and initiated the process that would take him to normal space. His eyes closed…
. . . and opened — to find Judith Niles calmly peering in at him through the tank’s transparent cover. She had an unreadable smile on her face, and when he was fully awake she opened the door and helped him out. He looked at her warily. “Come on, Sy Day,” she said. “You and I need to talk, just the two of us. I think my office will feel more comfortable than the chamber here.” And without looking at him she turned and led the way.
She took him toward the main labs of Gulf City, in the very center of the station. Sy soon found himself in a well-appointed set of rooms, with pictures on the walls, shelves of genuine books, and serried ranks of monitors. She waved at them.
“First lesson. I’ll be throwing a lot of lessons at you. Don’t ever assume that you are unobserved in Gulf City. I learned the art of monitoring from a master — the only master I’ve ever known. From here you can watch everything.” She initiated a suite-spin to give an effective gravity about half that of Earth, then sank into an armchair and tucked her feet in under her. She gestured Sy to take a seat opposite. There was a long silence, during which they performed a close inspection of each other.
“Want me to do the talking?” she said at last.
Sy shook his head. “You first, me second. You know I have questions.” “Of course you do.” Judith Niles leaned back and sighed. “I wouldn’t be interested in you if you didn’t. And I think I have some answers. But it has to be a two-way street.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Everything. Cooperation, understanding, brain-power, new ideas — maybe partnership.” She was staring at him with peculiar intensity, eyes wide and unblinking beneath the scarred forehead. “It’s something I haven’t had in all the years since we left Earth. I think you can be a full partner. God knows, we need it. We’re dying for lack of fresh thoughts here. Every time a new arrival finds a way to Gulf City, I’ve waited and hoped.” Her expression had changed, become almost beseeching. “I think you’re different. We can read each other, you and I. That’s rarer than you know. I want you to help me recruit your companions, because I’m not sure I can do that. They’re a stubborn pair. But you think in the same way as I do. I suspected you would come here, to normal space, because it’s exactly what I do myself, when I need quiet time, time to think. You heard that it’s bad to go from normal space to S-space and back too often?” Sy nodded. “That’s what Olivia Ferranti told us. She believes it, but I’m not sure I do. I’ve seen no evidence of it.”
“I don’t think you will. If there are bad effects, they are very subtle.” Judith Niles smiled again, an open smile that lit up her face. “But a system in which people pop into normal space to think is hard to control. You don’t take other people’s word for much, do you?”
“Should I?” Sy’s face was expressionless. “Look, if this is to be more than a waste of time, let’s get to specifics. You’re right, I came here to think before we met with you again. I needed time. Gulf City seemed like a big charade — a place without a plausible purpose. If you want my cooperation, and the cooperation of Peron and Elissa, begin by telling me what’s really going on here — tell me why Gulf City exists.”<
br />
“I’ll do better than that.” Judith Niles stood up. “I’ll show you. You can see for yourself. I don’t often have a chance to brag about the work we’ve done here, but that doesn’t mean I’m not proud of it. Put this suit on — we’ll be visiting some cold places.”
* * *
She led the way down a long corridor. The first room contained half a dozen people, all frozen in postures of concentration around two beds occupied by recumbent forms.
“Standard S-space lab.” Judith Niles shrugged. “No big mysteries here, and no justification for Gulf City. We still conduct sleep experiments in S-space, but there’s no reason except my personal interests why this has to be here. This is my own lab. I started out in sleep research, back on Earth — it led us to discover S-space. The main center for sleep research is still back in the Sol System, under Jan de Vries. The best protocol we know reduces sleep to about one hour in thirty. Our end objective is still the same: zero sleep.”
She closed the door. Another corridor, another lab, this one entered through a double insulating door. Before they went inside, they sealed their suits. “Temperature here is well below freezing.” Niles spoke over the suit radio. “This one should be more interesting. We discovered it about seven thousand Earth-years ago. Wolfgang Gibbs stumbled across the condition when we were exploring the long-term physiological effects of cold sleep. He calls it T-state.”
The room had four people in it, each sitting in a chair and supported at head, wrists, waist, and thighs. They wore headsets covering eyes and ears, and they did not move.
Sy moved forward and looked at each of them closely. He touched a frozen fingertip, and lifted the front of a headset to peer into an open eye. “They can’t be in S-space,” he said at last. “This room is too cold for it. Are they conscious?”
“Completely. These four are volunteers. They have been in T-state for almost one thousand Earth-years, but they feel as though they entered it less than five hours ago. Their subjective rate of experience is about a two-millionth of normal, roughly one thousandth of the usual S-space rate.”
Sy was silent, but for the first time he looked impressed.
“Mind-boggled?” She nodded. “We all felt the same when Wolfgang showed us. But the real significance of T-state won’t be obvious to you for a little while yet. It’s hard to grasp just how slow time passes there. Let me tell you how Charlene Bloom put it when she and I had our first one-minute experience of T-state: in the time it takes a T-state clock to strike the hour of midnight, Earth would pass through two whole seasons, from winter to spring to summer. A full life on Earth would flash by in half a T-hour. We have no idea of the human life expectancy for someone who remains in T-state, but we assume it’s hundreds of millions of Earth-years.”
“Why the headsets?”
“Sensory perception. Humans in T-state are blind, deaf and dumb without computer assistance. Our sense organs are not designed for light and sound waves of such long wavelength. The headsets do the frequency adjustment. Want to try T-state?” “Definitely.”
“I’ll put you on the roster to spend a few minutes there. That’s enough. Remember the time rate difference — one T-minute costs most of a day in S-space, and nearly four Earth-years.”
Again Judith Niles turned to leave the room. Sy, after a final glance at the four cowled and motionless figures, followed her outside and along another long and dimly lit corridor. He noted approvingly that her energy and concentration remained undiminished.
They finally approached a massive metal door, protected against entry by locks that called for fingerprint, vocal, retinal, and DNA matching. When Sy was cleared by the system and stepped inside, he looked around him in surprise. He had expected something new and exotic, perhaps another frozen lab, full of strange experiments in time-slowing or suspension of consciousness; but this room appeared to be no more than a standard communications complex. And a dusty, poorly maintained one at that.
“Don’t judge by appearances.” Judith Niles had seen his expression. “This is the most important room in Gulf City. If there are any secrets, they’re here. And don’t think that human nature changes when people move to S-space. It doesn’t, and most individuals never question why things are done the way they are in our system. If they do question, they are shown what you are about to see. If not, we don’t force the information on them. This is the place where the oldest records are accessed.”
She sat down at the console and performed a lengthy coded entry procedure. “You should try cracking this, if you think you’re a hot-shot at finding holes in system software. It has six levels of entry protection. Let’s feel our way into the data base gradually. This is a good place to begin.”
She entered another sequence. The screen lit with the soft, uniform white glow characteristic of S-space. After a few moments there appeared on it a dark network of polyhedral patterns, panels joined by silvery filaments. “You’ve seen one of these yourself, I gather. Gossameres and Pipistrelles — possibly the first alien intelligence that humans discovered. We ran into them twenty thousand Earth-years ago, as soon as deep space probes began with S-space crews; but we’re still not sure if they possess true intelligence. Maybe it depends on our definition. Interesting?”
Sy shrugged in a noncommittal way.
“But not that interesting?” Judith Niles touched the control console again. “I agree. Abstractly interesting, but no more than that unless humans learn to set up a real dialog with them. Well, we have tried. We located their preferred output frequencies, and we found that simple signal sequences would drive them away and discourage them from draining our power supplies. But that’s not much of a message, and we never got beyond it. The Gossameres and Pipistrelles proved to be a kind of dead end. But they served one enormously important function. They alerted us to a particular wavelength region. We began to listen on those frequencies anytime we were in deep space and thought there might be a Gossamere around. And that’s when we began to intercept other signals on the same wavelengths — regular coded pulses of low-frequency radiation, with a pattern like this.”
On the screen appeared a series of rising and falling curves, an interlocking sequence of complex sinusoids broken by regularly spaced even pulses. “We became convinced they were signals, not just natural emissions. But they were faint and intermittent, and we couldn’t locate their sources. Sometimes, a ship on an interstellar transit would pick up a signal on the receiver, long enough for the crew to lock an imaging antenna onto the signal source direction. They might receive a faint source image for a while, then they would lose it as the ship moved on. It was tantalizing, but over the years we built up a library of partial, blurred images. Finally we had enough to plug everything into a computer and look for a pattern. We found one. The ‘sightings’ took place only near the midpoints of the trips, and only when the ships were far from all material bodies and signal sources. The signals were received only when we were in deep space — the deeper, the better.
“By then we knew we were seeing something different from Gossameres and Pipistrelles. The new sources were very faint and distant, and the reconstructed image outlines showed a hint of a spiral structure, nothing like those paneled polyhedra. But we were still too short of information. It seemed a fascinating scientific mystery, but not much more. That was when Otto Kermel proposed a series of missions for a long-term search and study of the objects. “I don’t claim or deserve any credit for what happened next. I thought his idea would go nowhere, and gave him minimal resources and support. He did all the pioneer work on his own. We gave him the use of a one-man ship, and he went away to a quiet location about seven light-years from Sol. He argued that the absence of electromagnetic and gravitational fields was essential to studying the objects. Although his first objective was communication with them, he found that a round-trip message to even the nearest of them took two S-years. That limited him, but during his studies he discovered lots of other things.
“First, he fo
und many Kermel Objects, all around the Galaxy. The signals we intercept are not intended for us. We are eavesdroppers on transmissions between the Kermels, and those signals between them are numerous. Based on the length of those transmissions, Otto concluded that the Kermel Objects are immensely old, with a natural life-rate so slow that S-space is inadequate to study them — in thousands of Earth-years, he was receiving only partial signals. Otto claimed that he could partially decode their messages, and he believed that they have been in existence since the formation of the Universe — since before the Big Bang, according to one of his wilder reports. He also suggested that they propagate not by exchange of genetic material, but by radio exchange of genetic information. We have not been able to verify any of those conjectures, and Otto could not provide enough data for convincing proof. What he needed was the T-state, and a chance for more extended study periods on a time scale appropriate to the Kermel Objects. But by an accident of timing, he departed for a second expedition just before the T-state was discovered. And he has never returned.
“By the time he left, though, we had changed our ideas about the practical importance of studying the Kermel Objects. We decided that it is central to the future of the human species. We have continued his work, but without much of his data base. Take a look at this.”
Judith Niles projected another scene onto the display. “Does it seem familiar?” Sy studied it for a second or two, then shrugged. “It’s a picture of a spiral galaxy, looking down on the disk. I’ve no idea which one.”
“Correct. There’s no way you’d recognize it, but it’s this galaxy, seen from outside. That signal was recorded by Otto Kermel, from one of the Objects sitting way up above the galactic plane. And as part of the same signal, this image came with it.” At her keyed command, another picture overlaid the first one. It was the same galaxy, but now the star patterns were shown in different colors. “Keep watching closely. I’m going to zoom.”
Between the Strokes of Night Page 25
