Gateway to Never (John Grimes)

by A Bertram Chandler

  It was hot under the trees, hot and damp. We were ankle-deep in decayed vegetation that squelched unpleasantly as we walked. The trees were . . . trees. I’m no botanist. Their tall, straight trunks, exploding many metres above ground level into clouds of green and yellow foliage, were obscured by broad-leaved, sharp-spined creepers that, stretching horizontally between the trees, formed a natural barbed wire entanglement. We did not see any large animal life although we heard things scuttling in the undergrowth. There were flying things—insects?—but they did not come near us. There was something else—reptile? mammal?—that could almost have been a scale model of an ancient biplane. We were not able to make a close examination of it, nor did we much wish to.

  We pressed on, sweating profusely. After a while Sonya and I relieved Bill Smith and Susan Howard at the head of our little column. Grimes, as navigator, was exempt from machete work. Mayhew, as our psionic lookout, was likewise exempt. So was Sara; if there were any chopping to be done with a submachine gun she was the one best qualified to do it. I soon began to wish that I loo was exempt from the manual work. Those strands of creeper not only looked like barbed wire, they were almost as tough. We should have brought along a whetstone. I said as much to the commodore. He grunted, muttering that a man cannot think of everything. His wife—her hands were as blistered as mine—told him tartly that to think of everything was his job. He made no reply.

  At last we became aware that the trees were thinning out. More direct sunlight was striking through the high foliage and there were quite long stretches not obstructed by that infernal, thorny creeper. Too, the ground was drier underfoot and the dead leaves were crackling rather than squelching. Under the leaves was a hard surface. We paused and Sonya and I squatted, clearing the dead vegetation away with our hands. What we uncovered was, we decided at length, artificial—but old, very old sort of concrete it could have been weathered and stained with exudations. It was a dirty yellow rather than gray.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” said Grimes. He was obviously quoting from some work unfamiliar to me. Sonya and Mayhew rewarded him with a small burst of laughter. He sang untunefully, “We’re off to see the Wizard . . .” There was more laughter while Sara, the two young scientists and myself looked at him uncomprehendingly.

  We marched on. It was not hard to follow the road. It was almost an avenue, with the tall trees on either side of it. Had it been straight we should have seen the city long before we did. The first sight we had of it as we rounded a wide bend was a lofty tower, a structure that must have been loftier still before its upper levels had crumbled, had fallen to a heap of rubble around its base. There were more towers, a vista of them before us. None was intact. They were like guttered candles, their flames long extinguished. This was, I realized, the city that we had seen, but briefly, when making our escape from the temple.

  Guttered candles . . .

  The towers on the outskirts of the city had been smashed, those towards the centre had been . . . melted. As we walked along the radial street, surprisingly free of vegetation, we realized that the heat, whatever had caused it, had been of greater intensity towards the centre of the town. I’m a merchant spaceman but I’m also a naval reserve officer. I know something about weapons. I’ve taken all the required courses, seen the films. I didn’t have to ask Grimes what destructive agent had been unloosed here—how long ago? Already I’d have been willing to predict what we would find at ground zero. I did not think that it would have been damaged by blast or radiation. We marched on.

  Apart from half-melted rubble from the towers the streets—the ringroads and the radial thoroughfares—were remarkably free of debris. There were not, as there had been in that other city in this place, our city, the carcasses of long-abandoned vehicles. Grimes suggested that we investigate one of the towers before we pressed on further. We did so, entering cautiously through an open door that obviously had not been designed for use by beings even remotely human. It was too low, too wide. The beams of our torches augmented the daylight that seeped through the dust-encrusted windows. The ground level seemed to be no more than a sort of vestibule. In the centre of it was a group of statuary. Possibly it had once been an ornamental fountain. Two many-limbed beings were locked either in combat or copulation. They were, Mayhew told us, like the dead arthropod that he and Clarisse had found in that weird cavern at the heart of the planet, that we had tried to drag out and up with one of the sounding machines. Statues of the beings who had built—and destroyed?—this city, or of familiar or mythological animals? (Alien travelers coming upon some long-deserted human city might assume, from the evidence of statuary in public places, that such beings as mermaids and mermen actually once existed.)

  “These were the people,” said Mayhew slowly. “Arthropods, like giant Terran crabs. But that should not be surprising. After all we, in our universe, are familiar enough with the Shaara. And they’re arthropods.”

  Grimes said, “It’s easy to accept the idea of beelike beings building lip a technological civilization. But crabs or lobsters . . .”

  “Why not?” asked Mayhew. He shone the beam of his torch on to one of the statues. “Look at the way in which these forelimbs terminate in handling tools—some for coarse, heavy work, some for the most delicate operations. Everything from shifting spanners . . .” the light shifted . . . “to micrometers. One hand—if I may call it a hand—for building a steam engine, another for repairing a lady’s watch . . .”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “And do you feel anything, Ken? Did these beings leave any . . . record? Any . . . ghosts, like the ghost that George saw in the city, the other city, the first time?”

  “They may have done, John—but I can’t . . . receive. How shall I put it? It’s like expecting a Carlotti receiver to pick up a Normal Space-Time transmission, or the other way round. This place was lived in, once. I can tell you that much. But it was so long ago that the . . . records have faded, and even if they hadn’t . . .”

  We looked at the statues a little while longer. The group compelled interest but it was not the sort of thing I’d have liked to have lived with. And then we went slowly up the ramp that, following the curvature of the inner wall, took us up to the next level. There were living quarters there. There was furniture that might, conceivably, have been beds and chairs. There were what could have been bathrooms—or kitchens. There was one room that could have been a playroom or a workroom, and in this, on a low table, was a beautiful ship model. It was a greatly scaled down replica of the airship that we had seen, a little less than a metre in length, a cylinder, hemispherical at its ends, with a profusion of vanes protruding at odd angles, with what could have been gun turrets.

  We took photographs—I should dearly have loved to have taken that airship model and not merely its picture, but we were already loaded with weapons and other equipment—and then made our way out of the ruined tower and continued our march to the city centre. We did not have much time to spare; the sun was approaching the meridian and we were determined to be back aboard Basset before dark.

  The commodore had put his compass away. Mayhew was now our direction finder. He was homing in on the temple—or whatever form it had assumed in this otherwhen universe.

  We found it without difficulty. It was as we had seen it before—a featureless, subtly distorted cube. It stood by itself, at the intersection of imaginary diagonals drawn between four towers—or what had, once, been towers. Now they were little more than shapeless mounds of slag. Not far from the building was a little pile of bright, twisted metal. It looked somehow familiar. We walked to it cautiously, inspected it. It was the wreckage of one of the sounding machines that we had used to rescue Ken and Clarisse. It was the one that the boat had dragged up from the roof of the temple by the power lead. A length of insulated cable was still plugged into it, and from the winch drum extended a tangle of piano wire. But the door of the temple was no longer rectangular but more nearly an ellipse. And the lettering over it was in no famil
iar script but an indecipherable scrawl. It looked, I thought, like the record left by the claws of a crustacean on damp sand.

  “Here’s your sounding machine, George,” said Grimes. “Or one of them. I wonder if the other one is still on the roof . . .”

  “If we could get there we could find out,” I said shortly. There was no way of scaling those featureless walls.

  “We can go inside the temple,” said Grimes.

  “Do we want to?” asked Sonya sharply.

  “What did we come out here for?” he countered. Then, to Mayhew, “Ken, do you feel anything now?”

  “No more than before,” replied the telepath. “It is aware that we are here. What Its intentions are I cannot say.”

  We went to the door. We pushed it. It showed no signs of giving. And then somebody thought of applying a sidewise pressure. The panel moved then, reluctantly at first and then easily, sliding clear of the oval opening. We entered the temple.

  There was light of a sort in the huge, windowless room, a gray, shifting twilight. As before there was the wrongness of the angles where wall met wall, ceiling and floor. There was the distortion of Space, of Space-Time. When we spoke it was like being inside an echo chamber—not that any of us did much speaking. The . . . the altar was still there—but why should it not have been? The altar—coffin or tesseract, or both, shining wanly with a light that, somehow, was not light, a dead, ashy radiance.

  But there were changes. The shape of the door, and the inscription over it. And the hole that we had cut in the roof was no longer there, and there were no marks on the smooth ceiling to show that it ever had been. (In this Time and Space it never had been.)

  “What now?” asked Sonya.

  “What now?” repeated Grimes. “Well, I suppose we find out if the . . . altar is still functioning.” He asked sardonically, “Any volunteers? No? Then can somebody spare something that we can throw into the gateway to the interior?”

  “Your pipe,” suggested his wife. He said, “I was brought up never make sacrifices to strange gods. And that would be a sacrifice . . . talking of sacrifices—any virgins among those present?”

  Susan Howard blushed painfully. Sonya said sharply, “That wasn’t funny, John.”

  “My apologies, Miss Howard.” Grimes could turn on the charm when he wanted to. “Believe me, I had no idea . . .”

  Grimes had opened his pack, taken from it the little parcel of sandwiches that was to be his midday meal. He said, “And now I must apologize to you, Sara. But I can spare one of these dainties; since I have been aboard Basset I have been eating too much. Which shall it be? The cheese, I think . . .”

  He tossed the little square of filled bread into the tesseract. It faded, vanished.

  “So . . .” he murmured.

  “What now?” demanded Sonya.

  “We go outside, sit down, enjoy our lunch, and then return to the ship.”

  “You mean to say that we’ve come all this way just to watch you waste good food?”

  “We must be back before dark, my dear. Our expedition has not been altogether fruitless. We know that we have suffered dimensional displacement. We know that the temple still exists, and that the gateway to It is still open.”

  “And we know that It likes cheese sandwiches,” said Sara. “At least, it didn’t spit out the one you fed it . . .”

  We all laughed. There was precious little to laugh about so we made the best of what we had.

  We left the temple. We sat down on the ground a respectable distance from the building, made a sketchy meal of sandwiches and coffee from our vacuum flasks. When we had finished I walked over to the twisted wreckage of the sounding machine. It looked as though somebody had tried to turn it inside out, not altogether unsuccessfully. Suppose that this had happened to us . . . I thought. But it hadn’t, so why worry about it? Or—the idea sent a cold chill down my spine—perhaps it had, and we didn’t know about it, whereas that metallic tangle would look the way it had looked in our universe . . .

  Then the others got to their feet and we started the march back to the ship. I hoped that she would still be where we had left her. Mayhew, reading my thoughts, assured me that she would be.

  We came to the outskirts of the city, to the tower that we had entered earlier. I said to Grimes, “Wait a couple of minutes, Commodore.”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “That airship—or spaceship—model. I’m going to pick it up. I think that we should examine it properly when we get back to Basset.”

  He said, “You’ll be carrying it. It’s your idea, so you do the work.” He relented slightly. “If it’s too heavy we’ll distribute your other bits and pieces among the rest of us.”

  Sara accompanied me into the building. She hadn’t fired a shot all day and was, I was sure, hoping that something would spring out at us from the shadows. She was disappointed. I was not. The beautiful little ship model was where we had last seen it. (There was no reason why it shouldn’t have been, but on Kinsolving one takes nothing for granted.) I picked it up. It was heavy, too damned heavy. Holding it carefully in my arms I made my way down the ramp, followed by Sara. It seemed to me that it was not so heavy as it had first been and assumed that it was because I had adjusted to the weight and the awkwardness. When I was outside the others gathered round to look at it, to admire it. It gleamed brightly in the sunlight, its vanes like metal mirrors. There was surprisingly little dust on it.

  “It could almost be a lightjammer,” said Grimes at last. “If the sails were larger . . .”

  “Lightjammer or not,” I quipped, “it’s certainly not light . . .”

  But wasn’t it? There was almost no strain on my arms now. And what was that vibration that I could feel? What was the almost inaudible hum that I could hear? And was I the only one hearing it? Somehow it reminded me of being in the control room of a ship, listening to the quiet song of her machinery, main and auxiliary, conscious that the vessel was part of me, no more (and no less) than an extension of my own body. A touch of a finger, and she would lift . . . She lifted.

  I was as amazed as the others. I stood there, mouth open, gazing at the glittering machine rising slowly into the clear sky.

  “Captain Rule,” said Mayhew sharply, “bring it back.”

  “But how, Ken? How?”

  “The same way that you got it up,” he told me. “You’re in a control room. Your control room. You are the ship. The ship is you . . .”

  Fantastically, I was looking down at the group outside the ruined tower, on the fringe of the jungle. I could see my own face among the upturned visages. And that was my marker beacon for the landing. I came down slowly, carefully; I hadn’t got the feel of this vessel yet but knew that distortion of the vanes would reduce their power-collecting efficiency. Where that knowledge came from I did not know. It was just there. I was more concerned about the possibility of damage to the ship than to myself, notwithstanding the fact that my body was the target that I was aiming for.

  The little ship settled gently into my outstretched arms. A nice piece of pilotage, I thought smugly. And then I stared at the thing that I was holding like a baby. What the hell was happening? And what was I doing, and how the hell was I doing it? Was this model a toy, a robot toy, at least partly sentient?

  “Not a toy,” said Mayhew. “Not a toy, but a simulator . . .”

  “A simulator?”

  Mayhew laughed softly. “Yes. And you, Captain, were the first spaceman with whom it’s been in contact for the Odd Gods of the Galaxy alone know how many millennia. You’ve heard of imprinting?”

  “Of course. But this is a . . . machine, not an animal.”

  “And aren’t animals machines?” countered Mayhew. “Including ourselves.”

  This was cheating, I thought. It was the sort of argument that one might expect from a materialist, but not from one whose profession, to many people, smacked of the supernatural.

  “So the builders of this city were, in some ways, more
advanced than ourselves,” said Grimes. “So they could control their machines directly by thought . . . Mphm. I wonder if that thing will take my orders . . . I’m a shipmaster, like you, so there should be some affinity . . .”

  He stared at the ship model, scowling with concentration. “Lift,” I heard him mutter. “Lift!”

  Nothing happened.

  Sonya tried, then Sara, then the two young scientists, and finally Mayhew. The model stayed snugly in my arms. After they had all given up I sent the thing aloft, drove it around above our heads in a tight circle, made it dive and soar and, finally, hover.

  “It’s your pet,” Grimes admitted. “It’s your . . . doggy.”

  “It’s a pity,” said Sonya, “that the engineers will have to take it to pieces to see what makes it tick.”

  “Why should they?” I demanded.

  She said, “It’s obvious that, somehow, this toy converts radiation into power, usable power. Antigravity, perhaps. And power is just what we need right now.”

  I said, “And if my ham-handed mechanics ruin this machine without finding out what makes it work—don’t forget that I know them better than you do—we shall be no better off than we are now. On the other hand, if we keep it intact we shall have a means of lugging supplies from the ship to wherever we need them. I . . . I feel, somehow, that it will be capable of lifting quite a big weight.”

  “Mphm,” grunted Grimes. “Perhaps we can find out right now just what it can do.”

  “No,” I said. “That will have to wait until we get back to the ship. The engineers will have to make some sort of harness that will fit around the hull without damaging, or even touching the vanes. Don’t ask me how I know—I just do—but those surfaces must be at exact angles each to the other.”