CANTATA-141

by Philip K. Dick

  'Don't be so sure George Walt would be noticed,' Sal said. 'He, the actual living brother, may have carried his synthetic twin over in dissembled form, identified as maintenance and colonizing equipment; everyone who goes across carries something, some of them a couple tons.'

  'Why would George Walt emigrate ?' In fact, why had they shut the satellite down ? Nobody had been able to explain that to his satisfaction, although a number of theories had been floating around, the central one being that George Walt anticipated Jim's election and realized that their day had virtually arrived.

  'Maybe the Pekes will take care of them,' Sal offered. 'They would be rather a disheartening apparition, appearing in their midst; the Pekes might take it as a bad omen and cast the two of them back here in pieces.'

  'Who would be able to find this out ?' Jim said.

  'You mean what George Walt are up to on the other side - assuming they're there ? Perhaps Tito

  Cravelli.'

  'How would Tito know ? He doesn't have any contacts among the Peking people.'

  Sal said, 'Tito keeps tabs on everything.'

  'Not on this,' Jim disagreed. 'George Walt, if they've crossed over, have gone where we can't scrutinize them; that's the cold, hard truth and we might as well face it.' Broodingly he said, 'If I

  was positive they'd crossed over, I think I'd seriously plead with TD to shut the 'scuttler down.

  To keep them bottled up over there, for the rest of eternity.'

  'Are you that much afraid of George Walt ?'

  'Sometimes I am. Especially very late at night. I am right now, hearing about this.' He moved a little away from Sal Heim, feeling depressed. 'I thought we were through with George Walt," he said.

  Through with them ? Without killing them ?' Sal laughed.

  I guess in the final analysis I'm not very bright, Jim Briskin said to himself glumly. We should have finished it, up there at the satellite, when we almost had them. Instead we chose to shuffle naively back to Terra, for what seemed a good idea at the time: a cup of hot syntho-coffee.

  Now, it did not seem very brilliant. The passage of even a little time was a great edifier.

  Sal said sardonically, 'Hell, Jim, maybe you won their respect by being so charitable.' He obviously did not think so. Far from it.

  'You're a great second-guesser,' Jim said, with bitterness. 'Where were you with your advice then ?'

  Sal said quietly, 'Nobody expected them to do something so radical as close the Golden Door.

  What happened up there on the satellite that day must really have shaken them.'

  Coming up beside him, ancient Leon Turpin leered happily and cackled, 'Well, Briskin, or whatever you call yourself, that's the first batch of bibs. Historic, isn't it ? Makes you feel young again, doesn't it ? Say something. At least, smile.' To Sal he said, 'Is he always this solemn ?'

  'Jim runs deep, Mr. Turpin,' Sal said. 'You have to get accustomed to it.'

  'Just wait until we get that rent enlarged,' Turpin wheezed. 'My boys have been on it all week and tonight they're going to hook up an entirely different power source; it's all plotted out, rechecked dozens of times. By tomorrow morning, we should have a hole two to three times bigger. And then we can really hustle them through. Zip.' He made a quick gesture.

  'Have you made thorough provision,' Jim said, 'to receive them back in the event something goes wrong on the other side ?'

  'Well,' Leon Turpin conceded, 'the 'scuttler will be turned off most of the night as the boys work it over. Nobody can pass through then, of course. But we weren't expecting any trouble. At least not so soon.'

  Sal and Jim glanced at each other.

  'President Schwarz said it would be agreeable,' Turpin added. 'After all, our contract is with the

  Dept of SPW. We're acting well within the law. There's nothing that compels us to keep the

  'scuttler running at all times.'

  God pity those colonists, Jim Briskin said to himself, if anything does go wrong tonight.

  "They know about the Pekes,' Turpin protested. 'It's been in the papes constantly; nothing's been concealed from them; as soon as they were revived the situation was explained to them in detail.

  Nobody forced them to go.'

  Jim said, 'They were given the choice of going across or being put back to sleep.' He knew that for a fact; Tito had informed him.

  'As far as I'm concerned,' Leon Turpin said sulkily, 'those people are over there voluntarily. And any risk they're taking - '

  You skunk, Jim Briskin thought.

  It was going to be a long night. At least for him.

  At eleven p.m. Tito Cravelli received from one of his almost infinite number of paid contacts a piece of news which did not resemble anything he had ever picked up before. Frankly, he did not know whether to laugh or rush to the tocsin; it was simply too goddam peculiar. He mixed himself a whiskey sour in the kitchen of his conap and pondered. The datum had reached him by a circuitous route; initially it had been piped from a TD exploration team on the other side of the

  'scuttler nexus, prior to the shutting-down of the 'scuttler, and from there to Bohegian, whereupon Earl had of course relayed it to him. Was it possibly a gag ? If he could regard it that way, it would be a distinct relief. But he could not afford to; it might be bona fide. And in that case...

  Back in the living room, he dialed Jim Briskin's number. 'Listen to this,' Cravelli said, when he had Jim on the vidscreen. He did not bother to apologize for waking Jim up; that hardly mattered. 'See what you can make out of this. George Walt is with the Pekes, at their population center in northern Europe. TD's field corps believes they made contact with the Pekes somewhere in North America, and the Pekes then transported them across the Atlantic.'

  'So quickly ?' Jim said. 'I thought they had nothing better than slow surface ships.'

  'Here's the substance of it. The Pekes have installed George Walt at their capital and are worshipping them as a god.'

  There was silence.

  Finally Jim said, 'How - did the TD field corps find this out ?'

  'From parleys with North American Pekes. They've been palavering continually; you know that.

  Those linguistics machines have been droning on night and day. The Pekes are - dazzled. Well, weren't we a little in awe of George Walt ourselves ? It's not so odd when you think of it. I'd make book that George Walt went there anticipating some such reaction as that; they probably did some groundwork In advance.'

  Jim said cryptically, 'Another one of Sal's predictions bites the dust.' He looked weary. 'Cravelli, you know we're over our head. Schwarz is over his head. If someone suggested shutting - '

  'And strand those people over there ?'

  "They can be brought back tomorrow morning. And then it could be shut down.'

  'There's too much momentum behind it now,' Cravelli pointed out. 'You can't turn off a mass movement like that. In Dept of SPW warehouses all over the United States, they're rousing the sleepers right and left. Assembling equipment, arranging transportation to Washington, D.C. -'

  'I'll call Schwarz,' Jim said.

  'He won't listen to you. He'll think you're just trying to regain a primary relationship to the project, a relationship which he inherited by moving so quickly. Schwarz has the initiative now,

  Jim, not you. His whole political life depends on pushing those bibs across as fast as possible.

  Fix yourself a great big stiff type drink. That's what I did. And then go back to bed. I'll talk to you again in the morning. Maybe in the light of day we can hatch something out.' But he didn't think so.

  Jim said, 'I'll talk to Leon Turpin, then.'

  'Ha! Turpin and Schwarz are interlaced through that lush contract let to TD through Rosenfeld; it's a masterpiece. You can't offer TD that kind of money - I hear it involves billions of dollars, and all TD has to do is keep the 'scuttler going, just stand there and pump power to it.' Cravelli added, 'And enlarge the aperture, I understand. But that ought to be easy enough; the
y've been studying it for the last week.' In fact they had probably already accomplished it. 'I'm going back to my drink, now. And then I'm going to fix another and then ...'

  "There's one man who can stop this. The owner of the 'scuttler. I met him on that trip across the

  Atlantic. Darius Pethel, in Kansas City.'

  'Yes, he claims it as part of his inventory. But dammit, Jim, are you really sure you want to shut down the 'scuttler and stop emigration ? It would be the end of you politically. Sal must have told you that already.'

  Woodenly, Jim nodded. 'Yes. Sal told me.'

  'Don't do anything tonight'

  'We're in the grip of fate,' Jim said. 'We can't do anything; we've started something bigger than all of us put together. We may be seeing the end of the human race.'

  'Humanum est errare,' Cravelli said, assuming he was joking. But was he ? 'You don't mean that,'

  Cravelli said, stricken. 'I hate that kind of talk; it's morbid and defeatist and ten other things, all of them bad. That acceptance speech you gave at the nominating convention; it was cut out of the same lousy cloth. Sal ought to give you a good swift kick.'

  'I believe what I believe,' Jim said.

  At four a.m. the augmented power supply had been coupled to the Jiffi-scuttler; supervising the work, Don Stanley gave the go-ahead signal to start the 'scuttler back up. It had been off now for six and a half hours. His fingers crossed, Stanley tensely smoked his cigarette and waited as the entrance hoop gradually flared into unusual, pale-yellow brilliance, at least four times as bright as before.

  Beside him, Bascolm Howard, who had strolled in to watch, said, 'It certainly caught right away.

  No hesitation there.'

  'It really shines,' Stanley murmured. God, suppose we're overloading it he thought. Suppose it heats up too much and burns out. But the engineers who had done the work had assured him that the load was within the safe tolerance. And he had to go by what they said.

  'Tired ?' Howard asked him.

  'Darn right.' Stanley felt irritable. 'I ought to be home in bed.' We all should be, he said to himself. I'll be glad when they've run the final tests on this and it's ready to go back into operation.

  A senior engineer hopped into the tube of the 'scuttler and disappeared from sight. Stanley dropped his cigarette to the lab floor and savagely ground it out. Now we learn the truth, he realized. We get the poop, whether we've failed or been successful.

  Minutes passed.

  Reappearing, the engineer called to him. 'Mr. Stanley, would you come here, please ?'

  Stanley, on rubber legs, made his way to the tube. 'How is it inside there ?'

  The rent's big, now. Three and a half, maybe four times greater.'

  Feeling limp as tension throughout his body lessened, Stanley said, 'Fine. Now we can go home where we belong.'

  'I want you to look through the rent,' the engineer said.

  'Why ?' He did not see the point.

  The engineer said, 'Just look, okay ? For chrissake, will you please look, Mr. Stanley ?'

  He looked.

  Through the rent in the tube wall he saw, not a grassy meadow and ultramarine sky, no white flowers with buzzing, lazy bees tackling them. And he saw no sign of people. None of the tons of equipment which had been passed through the rent. No tents. No temporary septic tanks. No improvised food kitchens or overhead lighting. Instead he saw - and could not at first accept that he saw - a marshlike expanse, gray with mist and the hollow croakings of some distant birds. He saw reeds poking through the gummy, yellow water which lay in pools. A snake moved suddenly, twisting its path through the stagnant debris. And over to the right, some small living creature with a naked tail dropped to safety in the dense shadows beneath a cracked, hairy mass of roots.

  The air smelled of decay and silent, utter death.

  Pulling back into the 'scuttler tube, Stanley said hoarsely, 'It's not the same place.'

  His chief engineer nodded mutely.

  'It's a swamp,' Stanley said. 'My god, what kind of catastrophe is this ? Can you make any sense out of it ? We better get the original power supply right back on; you evidently can't increase the load and get the same results only more so, instead you get this, whatever it is.' He took one more look. All his determination was required merely to see it, let alone venture through the rent and actually into it. 'I think I understand,' he said, muttering to himself. 'There's not just one alter-

  Earth, parallel universe or whatever you call it; there's several, and why we didn't deal that factor into our planning I'll never know. We'll never make that mistake again.'

  'I agree,' his engineer said, beside him, also looking.

  'You think we can restore the original power supply and make contact again with where we dumped those people ?'

  'We can try.'

  'We've got to,' Stanley said. 'You know who'll get the rap; it'll be us. Start work immediately; we'll work the rest of the night.' God, he thought. What'll I tell old man Turpin ? Nothing. If we can get this patched up again we'll see it's forgotten forever. Like it never happened.

  I'm not thinking about us getting the blame,' the senior engineer said to him. 'I'm thinking about those people, especially those women, stranded there.'

  'They'll be okay! They've got supplies; they went there to colonize, so let them colonize. It was their idea to go across, they knew they were taking a risk. It was their responsibility. So tough tubes.' He drew himself back into the 'scuttler, shaking. 'Wow, what a hell of a sight. I can't see colonizing there. You think you'd like to live there, Hal ?'

  'No, Mr. Stanley,' the engineer said. He rose to his feet stiffly, waved to the team standing before the entrance hoop. 'Shut it off!'

  The power died. Stanley walked back out of the tubs and over to Howard. 'Now we have to take apart the whole damn thing again and fix it back up the way it was,' he said bitterly. 'What lousy luck. And it's going to take twenty years to get those millions of bibs through; President

  Schwarz'll never buy that. That's the end of that contract. That voids it automatically.' And to think we worked six and a half hours for this, he said to himself.

  Something appeared at the mouth of the tube.

  Stanley saw it, but, even as he saw it, the shadow-like substance vanished.

  'Who has a laser pistol ?' he said.

  'Get a laser pistol,' Howard said. Evidently he had seen it, too. 'It must have followed you. Come over from the other side. Before the power was turned off.'

  'It's just an insect,' Stanley said. 'Some miserable thing that flew up out of that swamp.' I know that's all it is, he said to himself. It's got to be. 'For chrissakes, somebody kill it!' he said, looking around. Where had it gone ? Not back into the tube, but out into the room.

  From within the tube, the senior engineer said loudly, 'Mr. Stanley, the rent never shut down.'

  'That's absolutely impossible,' Stanley said. 'The power's off.' He ran back into the tube, found the engineer crouched down by the rent. Once more Stanley saw across, into the world of the swamp, the decaying landscape of doomed, collapsing ruin. His senior engineer was right; it was still there.

  'I can think of only one explanation,' the engineer said to Stanley. 'It must be that it's maintained by a power source on the other side, because you know no power's coming to it from here; that's for sure.'

  Stanley said, 'Did you see something that slipped through just now ? Something alive ?'

  'Only for a second. But I thought it went back.'

  'It didn't go back,' Stanley said. 'It's out somewhere in the lab, in the TD building, on our side, and now more are going to come across because we can't shut down this damn rent. Maybe we can block it somehow. Can you put a barrier right up ? I don't care what it's made out of, just as long as it's good and solid.'

  'We'll get on it right away,' the engineer said and scrambled to his feet.

  What kind of power source could exist there on the other side ? Stanley asked himself. There in that brackish,
desolate swamp ... it's as if it were waiting. But how could it know we'd show up ?

  How could it possibly have been expecting us ?

  When he made his way out of the tube once more, Howard said to him, 'It's still somewhere in the room. I can feel it, but I'll be darned if I can see it. It's like it just merged with everything on this side, just sort of - you know, whatever it saw here.'

  Don Stanley tried to remember when he had felt such fear. Not for a long time. Had he ever reacted this way to anything in his life before ?

  Once, he recalled. Years ago. He had felt the same fright when as he had felt now, seeing this dark, pervasive substance scuttle into his world from the other side. I was eighteen, he said to himself. Just a kid. It was my first visit to the Golden Door satellite.

  It had been when he had first seen George Walt.

  Since it was impossible to close the rent, Don Stanley decided, they were going to have to make the attempt to subject the dimly-lit swamp world to some kind of ordered scrutiny. Taking full responsibility, he ordered a QB observation satellite brought to the lab with launching equipment. Before the barrier had been erected by TD's engineers he had sent the satellite across and had watched as it shot up into the murky, ominous sky.

  Reports from the orbiting satellite began to arrive almost at once, and he seated himself with

  Howard and started methodically to go over them. The time was five-thirty a.m. Much too early to awaken Leon Turpin, he realized. We'll just have to go on as we are, for at least another two hours.

  The planet - and he felt no surprise in learning this - was Earth. But the stellar chart which the satellite recorded on the dark side contained data which was totally unexpected. For a long time he and Howard sat together conferring, to be certain there had been no error. There had not. By six-thirty in the morning, Stanley was sure of the situation, sure enough to have Leon Turpin woken up at his home on Long Island.

  The QB satellite, this time, was orbiting an Earth in what was, for their world, a century in the future.

  'You realize what this implies, don't you ?' he said to Howard.

  'This could still be the same alter-Earth. The one we sent our colonists onto. Only we're seeing it a hundred years later.' Abruptly Howard shivered. 'Then what became of their colonizing efforts ? No trace at all ? After all, the satellite is picking up lights on the dark side in exactly the same locations as before.'