by Ben Bova
“In which we have put our surplus plutonium-186.”
“Or anything else you want to dispose of,” said Asenion.
Fletcher felt dizzy. “Which will travel on into the future at an infinite rate-”
“Yes. And because the rate is infinite, the problem of the breakdown of thiotimoline into its stable isochronic form, which has hampered most time-transport experiments, isn’t an issue. Something traveling through time at an infinite velocity isn’t subject to little limitations of that kind. It’ll simply keep going until it can’t go any farther.”
“But how does sending it into the future solve the problem?” Fletcher asked. “The plutonium-186 still stays in our universe, even if we’ve bumped it away from our immediate temporal vicinity. The electron loss continues. Maybe even gets worse, under temporal acceleration. We still haven’t dealt with the fundamental-”
“You never were much of a thinker, were you, Fletcher?” said Asenion quietly, almost gently. But the savage contempt in his eyes had the force of a sun going nova.
“I do my best. But I don’t see-”
Asenion sighed. “The thiotimoline will chase the water in the outer container to the end of time, carrying with it the plutonium in the inner container. To the end of time. Literally. “
“And?”
“What happens at the end of time, Fletcher?”
“Why-absolute entropy-the heat-death of the universe-”
“Precisely. The Final Entropic Solution. All molecules equally distributed throughout space. There will be no further place for the water-seeking thiotimoline to go. The end of the line is the end of the line. It, and the plutonium it’s hauling with it, and the water it’s trying to catch up with, will all plunge together over the entropic brink into antitime.”
“Antitime,” said Fletcher in a leaden voice. “ Antitime?”
“Naturally. Into the moment before the creation of the universe. Everything is in stasis. Zero time, infinite temperature. All the universal mass contained in a single incomprehensible body. Then the thiotimoline and the plutonium and the water arrive.” Asenion’s eyes were radiant. His face was flushed. He waved his scrap of paper around as though it were the scripture of some new creed. “There will be a tremendous explosion. A Big Bang, so to speak. The beginning of all things. You-or should I say I?-will be responsible for the birth of the universe.”
Fletcher, stunned, said after a moment, “ Are you serious?”
“I am never anything but serious. You have your solution. Pack up your plutonium and send it on its way. No matter how many shipments you make, they’ll all arrive at the same instant. And with the same effect. You have no choice, you know. The plutonium must be disposed of. And-” His eyes twinkled with some of the old Asenion playfulness. “The universe must be created, or else how will any of us get to be where we are? And this is how it was done. Will be done. Inevitable, ineluctable, unavoidable, mandatory. Yes? You see?”
“Well, no. Yes. Maybe. That is, I think I do,” said Fletcher, as if in a daze.
“Good. Even if you don’t, you will.”
“I’ll need-to talk to the others-”
“Of course you will. That’s how you people do things. That’s why I’m here and you’re there.” Asenion shrugged. “Well, no hurry about it. Create the universe tomorrow, create it the week after next, what’s the difference? It’ll get done sooner or later. It has to, because it already has been done. You see?”
“Yes. Of course. Of course. And now-if you’ll excuse me-” Fletcher murmured. “I-ah-have a dinner appointment in a little while”
“That can wait too, can’t it?” said Asenion, smiling with sudden surprising amiability. He seemed genuinely glad to have been of assistance. “There’s something I forgot to show you this afternoon. A remarkable plant, possibly unique-a nidularium, it is, Brazilian, not even named yet, as a matter of fact-just coming into bloom. And this one-wait till you see it, Fletcher, wait till you see it-”
Murder in the Urth Degree
by Edward Wellen
"Let there be day.”
Day was when he said it was. Periscoped sunlight obediently flooded the stateroom at the core of Terrarium Nine.
Keith Flammersfeld saw the light with still-closed eyes and knew that his little world remained safe and warm outside his eyelids. Lazily, he removed from his temples the interactive patcher that had put him into the video of Through the Looking-Glass that had just now faded from the screen of his computer/player.
He opened his eyes and sat up in his bunk and stretched. He loosed a jaw-cracking yawn, momentarily disappearing the chipmunk pouches that flanked his self-satisfied mouth. To keep up his muscle tone and stay in shape, he lay supine again and thought aerobic thoughts for a good five minutes. He was pushing forty, but he was pushing forty back.
Feeling fit after all that exercise, he sat up and swung around to put his feet on the carpeted deck. He checked his priorities: the call of nature could wait, the clamor from his stomach could not. He called for his tray.
It slid out of the bulkhead to fit just above his lap. He put away a healthy breakfast of fruits, vegetables, and grains-all grown right here inside Terrarium Nine. The tray sensed when the last of the food was gone and slid itself back into the bulkhead.
Flammersfeld stood up and got out of his pajama shorts. He tossed them into the revamper, stepped into the toilet cubicle and relieved himself, washed up, fizzed his mouth clean, and put on fresh shorts.
Two steps to the right took Flammersfeld to his office. He sat down at his master computer and tapped keys. The screen displayed a blank requisition form.
His face split in a huge grin as he typed two items and moused them into the right spaces. Tight facial muscles around mouth and eyes told him it was a malicious grin. At this awareness, he quickly slackened the grin into an expression of innocent merriment. Then, reminding himself that he was all alone aboard Terrarium Nine and that no one watched, he hauled again on the lines of the malicious grin.
He savored, then saved, the requisition. He was on the point of sending it to the home office on Earth, when he all but jumped out of his skin.
The lower right quadrant of the screen was displaying a reduced image of another monitor screen’s display.
This display labeled itself as coming from the work station in Buck Two. He put his own page on hold and filled the screen with the Intruding display.
He stared at it, feeling his eyes bulge.
Someone had entered his system and infected it with rabid doggerel.
Is the sun a milky bud?
Whence the shadows on my face? Why’s the sky as green as blood?
Who will win the Red Queen’s race?
Madness.
But even madness had to have a logical explanation.
Possible explanation number one, a computer virus. If true, it would have entered by way of the master computer, sole link to Earth and the universe. What would be the point of trying to trick him into thinking the message came from Buck Two’s slave computer, not from Buck One’s central memory? Merely the prankish pleasure of sending him on a wild-goose chase through Buck Two’s jungle? A small payoff for what would have to have been a major effort, cracking the vaccinated and regularly boostered Labcom system headquartered on Earth.
Possible explanation number two, a stowaway, presence hitherto entirely unsuspected by Flammersfeld and completely overlooked by all sensors. If true, the person would have had to slip aboard during resupply a full year ago. If such a one had survived all that while by living on the fruits and vegetables and grains grown in Terrarium Nine-though how that could be when Flammersfeld kept those precious items all carefully tagged and tabulated and tracked-why would that stowaway give his or her presence away at this point? Lonely and dying for companionship? Fallen ill and in need of help? Gone mad and about to attack? Having bided his or her time, now ready for a takeover bid?
Possible explanation number three, true madness-Flamm
ersfeld’s own. Could Flammersfeld himself have programmed that display, say while dream-experiencing Through the Looking-Glass? Had cabin fever affected his brain, split his awareness?
Even as he stared at the screen the display changed. Another verse appeared, letter by letter, slowly, painfully, as though stiff and hesitant fingers were working in real time.
When Adam delved
Was it then I selved?
When Eve span
Was it then I began?
Flammersfeld tightened his mouth. Someone was in Buck Two.
He hurried to his bulkhead safe and punched the combination. The safe door swung open and he armed himself with the blaser he had never dreamed he might one day have to use.
Terrarium Nine, in near-earth orbit, was a six-bucker-six concentric spheres built on R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic principle. A pseudo black hole at the center provided Earth-gravity for the innermost sphere. The calibrated pull diminished to nothing in the outermost sphere, where the zero-gravity lab was. Access was by companionway and lift. Terrarium Nine was large enough to make northern and southern companionways practical and efficient. The two-way lift, slightly bowed to bypass the pseudo black hole, ran along the axis, from polar airlock to polar airlock. The cage had handholds to facilitate orientation-rather, borealization or australization.
The Buck Two work station was in the northern hemisphere. Flammersfeld made for the lift, started to step in, then had a second thought.
He punched the lift to go north to Buck Two by itself, but entered a five-minute delay.
Swiftly he backtracked along the gently curving geodesic deckplates to the southern companionway, and raced up it to the hatch.
If someone lay in wait for Flammersfeld to emerge from the lift, and if that someone kept a shrewd eye on the nearby north companionway hatch, Flammersfeld, making his way around from the south, would come upon that someone from behind.
He glanced at his watch, sucked in, undogged the hatch. Blaser at the ready, he vaulted into Buck Two’s lesser gravity, where, in lunar soil with various admixtures of nitrates, plants flourished mightily.
He landed lightly, sought concealment in a ten-meter-high stand of slowly swaying rye. Held his breath, listened through the soft sough of programmed breeze, heard nothing. He’d outflanked the intruder; seemed safe to move out.
Made good time through chubby Swiss chard, enormous endives, plump peas, and bulky beans. In under four minutes he reached the stout sweet potatoes. Nearly there. The work station lay underneath the towering walnut tree dead ahead. Past that stood tremendous tomatoes, prodigious peppers, large lettuce, and corpulent cabbage; then a pile of mulch-and beyond all that the lift.
He padded carefully to the walnut and peered around the massive trunk. He saw plainly the computer station. No one was at it.
The tomato vines blocked his view of the lift area. Flammersfeld thrust against the soil for a giant leap. He caught one-handed hold, five meters up, of the stem of a thirty-meter tomato vine and hung there looking through and across vines and foliage while the blaser quested.
He heard the sudden coming-to-life hum of the lift.
That should make an ambusher take position. Flammersfeld had a commanding view of the lettuce and cabbage patches. An ambusher there would have a clear field to the lift and the northern companionway hatch. No one moved there.
The lift stopped and the door slid open. Flammersfeld looked for some stir somewhere. The blaser quested in vain. No one lay in wait.
He hung there, his face reddening with anger and frustration; the tomatoes were large as his head, so that it might have been one of them. A wild-goose chase after all.
Grimacing, he stuck the blaser in the waistband of his shorts and let himself down the vine hand under hand. Once on deck, he headed for the work station.
He stepped into a loop of vine and made a mental note to clear away debris and undergrowth first chance he got. Before he realized the loop was a noose, it had tightened around his ankle. Before he could bend to loosen it, he found himself whipped high into the air, where he remained dangling bouncily by his foot from the noose whose other end was tied to a springy bough of the towering walnut tree.
Rolling his eyes way up to look way down, he spotted the peg and the severed end of another length of vine that had held the bough to the deck. Where below was the trapper who had cut the tie?
Flammersfeld pretended to be helpless. He thrashed about, twisting, twisting in the continuously maintained light breeze. He made his voice sound panicky. “Help! Let me down! Please!”
Still the damned stowaway-for Flammersfeld had perforce settled on possible explanation number two-did not show his or her face.
Flammersfeld could not wait like this much longer; even with the inconsequential gravity of Buck Two, the noose was cutting off the circulation to his caught foot.
He gave himself one painful minute more; then, when no foe appeared, he drew the blaser from his waistband and sliced the vine.
As he fell he aimed the blaser deckward and thumbed the retro stud. The gelled-light effect slowed his fall enough to let him land rolling.
He scrambled to his feet-and groaned as the numbed foot betrayed him. He put his weight on his good foot and looked around for another trap-or even an outright attack. He looked high up at the walnut tree’s branches and foliage, saw no figure or contraption above him, and put his back against the trunk. He bent to remove the noose from his ankle-and saw on the ground a few fragments of cabbage leaf.
His jaw dropped as the chilling realization hit him.
Then his lips thinned. Very well. He knew now what he was up against.
It was not any of the three possible explanations. It was a fourth-and it was probable and in a few minutes would be provable.
He laughed. To think of the poor miserable creature stalking him!
Then he grew grim. He had underestimated the creature. That it might have been responsible for the doggerel on the computer screen had not even occurred to him. Had to give the thing credit; lot more to it than he had thought. Still, now that he knew, he could handle the threat.
“All right, you bastard,” he muttered through his malicious grin, “you’re digging your own grave. “
He hobbled directly to the cabbage patch. He looked down at an empty space and nodded. There had been an uprooting, though some effort had been made to smooth the disturbed soil.
As if that could fool him! He knew perfectly well what had grown at this particular spot, what should still be growing here, what seemed now on the loose.
A closer look at the soil showed him a dotted line of milky green droplets running from the center of the empty space. He touched one. Sticky. He brought the finger to his nose and sniffed. His grin widened. The damned thing was truly damned. Did it know it had not long?
The trail was short; it ended abruptly at a nearby cabbage. A freshly ripped edge showed where a leaf had been tom off. His grin stretched to its utmost. The creature must be using the leaf to stem the flow.
The trail gone, Flammersfeld cast about for other signs.
He glanced at the nearby heap of mulch. He felt a twinge for having neglected it; he had let it decompose almost to compost. He stiffened. There seemed some difference in its makeup, some shifting of its components. It consisted half of tree limbs he had sectioned for study or trimmed and split into rough boards and half of discarded paper printouts. He thought the paper covered more of the heap than when he had looked at it last-more spread out, less neatly accordioned.
The creature might be hiding under there.
Flammersfeld held the blaser ready to fire.
With his free hand he jerked lengths of dank and moldy continuous-fold printouts away in long fluttering banners. He did not find his creature but did unearth what appeared to be a crude catapult, a thing of branches and vine and a ball of compacted soil held together with some vegetable glue. He also found a winding drum fitted with a crank-a winch; this also was fashi
oned of sectioned tree limbs and vine.
Both contraptions looked as if a child might have put them together-but they had worked. The catapult had shot the weighted end of a length of vine over a bough and the winch had pulled the bough down.
He rooted around a bit more and found something else-half a walnut shell big as his cupped palm. The size he was used to; what it held was-something else.
The creature had used the empty half-shell as a mortar to pound something vegetable into a resinous black sticky substance that had an aromatic tarry smell. A crude preparation, showing foam of spit.
Visions of amylase danced in Flammersfeld’s head. What would the idiosyncratic enzymatic action be in this case-on, what he felt sure he would find when he analyzed it, green pepper? Seemed clear that the creature had in mind a curare, an arrow poison. That was just what this substance appeared to be.
Flammersfeld found himself asweat. He needed a relaxant-but not this kind. This kind could relax him to death.
Better get the hell out of here. The creature was sure to bleed to death-but how soon? Flammersfeld found himself not so sure any more about a lot of things concerning the creature.
How could he not have seen its intelligence waken, its hate turn on him?
Still crouching, he faced about. For the first time, he looked around at this small world from another’s point of view.
From the cabbage patch, the computer screen was in plain sight. How much the creature must have learned simply by watching and listening to the work and the play!
This was not the time to wonder about that. This was the time to beat it before a small arrow flew or a small lance thrust.
Flammersfeld straightened and hobbled double-time to the open lift.
He breathed a sigh at having made it, and reached to punch the door shut and the lift down.
The killer must have slipped into the lift while the noose held Flammersfeld adangle.
