Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  Squinting against the glare I looked over Grimes’ shoulder. At least, I thought, we should be thankful for small mercies; Mayhew had written on only one side of the sheet. I could just make out: Safe, so far, but no communication. It—the “it” was heavily underlined—will receive but not transmit. I can’t get inside its mind. It wants to know about us but does not want us to know about it. It’s draining us. Can you get us out?

  (It took us far longer to read the message than it has taken you.)

  “This piano wire is strong,” Grimes told me. “The weight of a human being is well below its safe working load, let alone its breaking strain. But I don’t fancy winching Ken or Clarisse—Clarisse especially—up by hand.”

  I was inclined to agree.

  Grimes wrote a short note to Mayhew, using the reverse side of the sheet on which the telepath’s message had been penned. He printed in large block capitals: HELP BEING ORGANIZED. GRIMES. We sent it down attached to the sinker.

  And then Taylor appeared with additional equipment, bringing the boat down to a landing almost at the edge of the roof. Also with him were Thorne’s assistants—Trentham, Smith, Susan Howard and Mary Lestrange. The mousey quartet showed signs of pleasurable excitement. A few turns on the hand winch, I thought sourly, would wipe the silly grins off their faces. Betty was with them. She had brought a sound-powered telephone set, a large reel of light cable and a tape recorder. And there was the second sounding machine, to which a motor from the engine room gantry had been attached. Porky Terrigal, the reaction drive engineer, had come along with it to make sure that nobody misused his precious machinery. There were also thermo-containers of hot and cold drinks and boxes of sandwiches, a couple of coils of strong plastic line that Bindle had sent along thinking that they might come in useful (they did) and a spidery-looking folding ladder that would give us access from the roof to the ground, and vice versa.

  The boat had to stay in position, as the power to the sounding machine winch would be fed from its fusion unit. Luckily, the rooftop was wide enough to accommodate all the extra people and gear without crowding. Sonya and Sara came up to join the party, leaving the Thornes standing watch below.

  Grimes turned the four young scientists to on the hand winch. By the time they got the sinker up to roof level they had lost their initial enthusiasm. The message was easier to read this time. To begin with, Mayhew had taken the hint and printed the words and, secondly, Susan Lestrange produced a small mirror from her shoulder bag. It said: WOULD LIKE A LITTLE MORE TIME. CAN YOU SEND TELEPHONE? KEN.

  We sent the telephone, and with it some food and drink. Betty hooked an amplifier up to the instrument at our end of the line. We waited anxiously, far from sure that things would work. What if what had been happening to the written word also happened to the spoken word? Then, after what seemed an eternity of delay, we heard Mayhew’s voice. “Thanks for the tucker, John! It’s very welcome. All the others seem to have died of thirst and starvation . . .”

  “What others?” asked Grimes.

  “Clarisse here,” came the reply. “Ken can’t talk with his mouth full. We’re safe, so far. But I’ll try to put you in the picture. It feels like a huge control room, like a ship’s, but much, much bigger. Only there are no controls as we know them, no banks of familiar instruments . . . This is a great, cavernous space with lights shifting and pulsing . . . We know that it all means something, that it isn’t mere, random activity, but what? But what? Maintaining stasis over uncountable millennia . . . Staying put in Time and Space while the Universe around it dies and is reborn . . .” A note of hysteria crept into her voice. “It . . . It has sucked us dry, of all we know, even of knowledge that we did not dream that we owned. And now It isn’t interested in us anymore. We can take our places with the . . . others . . .”

  “What others?” demanded Grimes.

  Mayhew came back on the line. “There are bodies here. Not decayed but . . . desiccated. Sort of mummified. Some human. Some . . . not. There’s . . . something not far from us with an exoskeleton. Something not from this Universe. And there are two things like centaurs . . . The arthropod thing is holding a machine of some kind . . . It could be a complicated weapon . . . And there’s all the time the slow, regular pulse of the coloured lights washing over everything, and there’s something that’s like a gigantic pendulum, but not of metal, but of radiance . . . I can feel it rather than see it . . .” He paused. “It’s like being a tiny insect in the works of some vast clock, only the wheels and the gears and the pendulum aren’t material . . .”

  Clarisse cried, interrupting, “But can you imagine a clock ticking backwards?”

  Thorne had climbed up the rooftop. He said, “I heard all that. We must try to bring up some . . . specimens.”

  “All that I’m concerned with,” Grimes told him, “is bringing our friends up.”

  “It would be criminal,” said the scientist, “to miss this opportunity.”

  “It will be criminal,” said Grimes, “to risk two lives any further. How do we know that the . . . gateway will stay open? No; we get Clarisse and Ken out of there now!”

  The wire of the hand-powered sounding machine had been reeled in by this time and, under Grimes’ supervision, the one with the electric motor was set up in its place. To the sinker the commodore attached one of the coils of light plastic rope. He said into the telephone, “You remember that book of mine you borrowed on bends and hitches and knots and splices, Ken? You should be able to throw a secure bowline on the bright with the line I’m sending down to you . . . Yes, you sit in it . . .”

  “But can’t he send up something, anything, first?” pleaded Thorne.

  “No, Doctor.” Grimes was adamant.

  “I overheard some of that,” came Mayhew’s voice. “I think we should. That lobster thing, and the contraption it’s holding in its claws . . . I could carry it up with me . . .”

  “Mayhew is speaking sense,” commented the scientist.

  There was a long wait. Then, “It’s heavy,” came the voice from the speaker. “Damned heavy. We can’t shift it . . .”

  “Then leave it,” Grimes ordered. “The sinker and the plastic line are on their way down to you now. I’m using the electrically powered machine, so I’ll have you and Clarisse up in no time.”

  “You have two machines?” asked Mayhew.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I’ll send Clarisse up first. Send the wire down again, and I’ll have made a sling with what’s left of the line and put it round the . . . thing. Then you bring me up with the hand-powered winch, and you can use the stronger one to lift the specimen . . .”

  “Well?” demanded Thorne.

  “All right,” Grimes agreed reluctantly.

  It took no time at all to extricate Clarisse. Grimes had sent Taylor down to the temple, accompanied by the two girl scientists, to pull her clear of the altar and then down to the floor as soon as she emerged. She joined us on the roof. I looked at her and tried to remember on which of her cheekbones that beauty spot had been . . .

  We sent the wire down again. Mayhew telephoned that he had the end of it, was making it fast to the sling that he had managed to get around the body of the weird alien. We then shifted the electric winch to one side, replacing it with the hand-powered one. Grimes was worried that the two sounding wires might become entangled, but the sinker dropped with the same speed that it had done on the prior occasions.

  Mayhew said that he was seated in the bowline and ready to come up. Trentham and Smith manned the winch handles. It was brutally hard work; the winch was not geared. After a while Grimes and I had to spell them. And then Thorne and Terrigal took a turn. Mayhew was bringing his end of the telephone up with him and was keeping us informed. “Like swimming up through a sort of gray fog . . .” he said. “I’m putting my hand out, but there’s nothing solid . . . I can see the other wire . . . I can touch that, but it’s all that I can touch . . . Looking up, I can see a sort of distorted square of white light
. . . It’s a long way off . . .”

  Yes, it was a long way. A long way for him, and a bloody long way for those of us who were doing all the work. I hoped that Dr. Thorne was enjoying his turn at the winch; it had been his idea that a specimen be brought up. If he hadn’t insisted Mayhew would have been whisked to safety with the same speed as Clarisse.

  We heard Taylor’s shout from below at last, just as Mayhew himself reported that he was being lifted into the temple. We came back on the winch after the third mate had caught his swinging feet and was lowering him safely to the floor. Once he was out of his harness he came up the ladder to join us on the rooftop.

  Now that the operation was almost over I realized, suddenly, how time had flown. It was almost sunset, and a chill breeze was blowing from the east. In a matter of minutes it would be dark. Kinsolving has no moon and here, on the Rim, there would be precious little starlight.

  Grimes said, “I think we should defer any further operations until tomorrow morning.”

  Thorne said, “But there are lights in the boat. A searchlight . . .”

  Mayhew said, “John, do we want that . . . thing? I’ve a feeling that the gateway may be closing again, at any second.”

  “Oh, all right,” said Grimes resignedly. He turned to me, “Let’s get the electric winch back on to the platform.”

  We did so. Then he told me, “It’s your equipment, George, operated by your personnel. Over to you.”

  I thought, You buck-passing old bastard! But what he had said made sense. I gestured to Terrigal at the winch controls, made the Heave Away! signal. The piano wire tightened. I looked over Terrigal’s shoulder and could see the pointer on the dial begin to move. I visualized that bundle of—something—being dragged across the floor of the . . . Cavern? Control room? The winch hadn’t got the weight yet.

  Then it took the strain and almost coincidentally the sun set. The light breeze was chillier still and there was almost no twilight. Somebody switched on the lights in the boat, including the searchlight, which flooded the rooftop with a harsh, white radiance. The winch groaned. Terrigal complained, “I can’t be held responsible for any damage to the machinery . . .”

  “Keep her coming!” I told him. I was more concerned about the baulks of timber upon which the sounding machine was resting than with the machine itself. But engineers, in my experience, always tend to be slaves to rather than masters of their engines.

  There was an acrid taint in the air from overheated metal and insulation and the wire, a filament of incandescent silver in the searchlight beam, was beginning to sing. But the pointer on the dial was moving—slowly, slowly, but moving.

  I asked, “Can’t you go any faster?”

  “No, Captain. I’m on the last notch now. And I don’t like it.”

  “Better get people cleared away from here, George,” Grimes told me. “If that wire parts it’s going to spring back . . .”

  “And what about me?” demanded Terrigal.

  “If you’re scared—” I began.

  “Yes, I am scared!” he growled. “And so would you be if you had any bloody sense. But I wouldn’t trust any of you on this winch!”

  All right, all right—I was scared. And it was more than a fear of a lethally lashing end of broken wire. It was that primordial dread of the unknown that has afflicted Man from his first beginnings, that afflicts, too, the lower orders of the animal kingdom. The darkness around the brilliantly lit rooftop was alive with shifting, whispering shadows. Most of our party, I noticed, had already taken refuge in the boat, a little cave of light and warmth that offered shelter, probably illusory, from the ultimate night that seemed to be closing around us. Only Grimes, Sonya, Sara and myself remained in the open—and, of course, Terrigal at the winch controls.

  The winch was making an eerie whining noise. The smell of hot metal and scorching insulation was much stronger. And the wire itself was keening—and was . . . stretching. Surely it was stretching. Surely that shining filament was now so thin as to be almost invisible.

  “Enough!” ordered Grimes. “Avast heaving!”

  The engineer brought the control handle round anticlockwise, but it had no effect. He cried, “She won’t stop!”

  “Mr. Taylor,” shouted Grimes into the boat, “switch off the power to the winch!”

  “The switch is jammed!” came the reply.

  “She won’t stop! She won’t stop!” yelled Terrigal, frantically jiggling his controls.

  The light was dimming, sagging down the spectrum, and outlines were wavering, and frightened voices sounded as though they were coming from an echo chamber. The thin high keening of the overtaut wire was above and below and through all other noises. Sonya and Sara were wrestling with the power cable, tugging at it, worrying it like two dogs fighting over a bone, trying to drag it out of its socket in the boat’s hull. It resisted all their efforts.

  “Let’s get out of here!” snapped Grimes. “Into the boat, all of you!”

  Terrigal abandoned his winch, but not before aiming a vicious kick at the control box. He scurried into the little airlock. The two women followed. Grimes and I made it to the door in a dead heat; he pushed me inside then followed hard after me. As soon as we were all in, Taylor, forward at the controls, slammed the inertial drive into maximum lift, not bothering to close the airlock doors first. We started to rise, then stopped with a jerk, heeling alarmingly to port. The power cable to the winch was holding us down. But it would soon part, I thought. It must part. It was only a power cable, not a heavy-duty mooring wire.

  It didn’t part. It . . . stretched. It shouldn’t have done, but it did. And we lifted again, slowly, with the inertial drive hammering like a mechanical riveter gone mad. I clung to the frame of the open door and looked down. I saw the sounding machine dragged up and clear from the circular hole in the roof, with the shining filament of wire still extending straight downwards.

  Terrifyingly, the city around the temple was coming to life—but it wasn’t the city that we had explored. The human colonists had laid out their streets in a rectangular plan; these streets were concentric circles connected by radial thoroughfares. And there were the tall, cylindrical towers, agleam with lights, each topped with a shining sphere. Unsubstantial they seemed at first, but as I watched they appeared to acquire solidity.

  Grimes saw it too. He shouted to Taylor, to Terrigal, to anybody who was close enough to the fusion generator to do something about it, “You have to cut the power to the winch! We’re dredging up the Past—and we shall be in it!”

  “Just show me how, Commodore!” cried the engineer. “Just show me how! I’ve done all that I can do—short of stopping the jenny!”

  And if he did stop the generator we should fall like a stone. If he could stop it, that is.

  An aircraft came slowly into view, circling us warily. It was huge, a cylindrical hull, rounded at the ends, with vanes sticking out at all sorts of odd angles. It was like nothing that I had ever seen and possessed a nightmarishly alien quality. There were tubes protruding from turrets that could have been, that almost certainly were guns, and they were trained upon us. What if the alien commander—I visualized him, or it, as being of the same species as the lobsterlike being whose body we had been attempting to recover—should open fire? What would happen to us?

  Nothing pleasant, that was for sure.

  But we had weapons of our own; we could, at least, defend ourselves if attacked. Sara, I was sure, would enjoy being able to play with her toys. And Sara, I suddenly realized, was beside me in the cramped little airlock, holding her submachine gun. I said to her, “What use do you think that will be? What’s wrong with the heavy armament?”

  She replied obscurely, “I can’t bring it to bear.” I couldn’t see why she couldn’t. That blasted flying battleship was staying well within the arcs of fire of the laser cannon and the heavy machine gun, and a guided missile would home on her no matter where she was relative to us.

  Sara opened fire. Bright t
racer flashed out from the muzzle of the gun, but not towards the huge flying ship. It may have been the first round of the burst that hit the power cable, certainly it was one in the first half-dozen. There was an arcing sputter of blue flame and the boat, released from its tether, went up like a bat out of hell.

  And below us the weird city out of Time flickered and vanished.

  I turned to Grimes. “You said, sir, that the things that happen on Kinsolving’s Planet shouldn’t happen to a dog. And they shouldn’t happen, either, to respectable employees of the Dog Star Line.”

  He managed a grin, then went, “Arf, arf!”

  Doggy in the Window

  DURING ALL MY YEARS as a Rim Worlder and as an officer in Rim Runners I’d never made a landing on Kinsolving’s Planet; come to that, I’d never come within extreme guided-missile range of that world. Now, as a naturalized Sirian and a captain in the Dog Star Line, I was not only on Kinsolving but stuck there. It shouldn’t have happened to a dog.

  I sat glumly in Basset’s control room, mulling things over in my mind. Commodore Grimes sat with me, presumably similarly employed, although his main preoccupation seemed to be keeping his vile pipe alight. There was nothing that either of us could do here, in the ship’s nerve centre, but it was a refuge from the others, from the incessant bombardment of questions to which we had no answers.

  I looked out through the wide viewports. The time was late afternoon and the peculiar quality of the sunlight was making the yellows and greens of the jungly landscape look positively poisonous. And, I was sure, the scenery did not look the same as it had looked on the occasion of our dawn landing the previous day. Bindle, my chief officer, swore that he had not shifted the ship during our absence from her and I did not doubt his word—but there were low hills where no hills had been before and the ruins that we could see in the distance looked nothing at all like the crumbling, overgrown remains of Enderston.