by James Gunn
Horn leaned against it. It swung in. Horn slipped into a dimly lit room and let the three-meter-tall door swing shut behind him. There was no one in the long room.
Horn turned back to the door. Beside it was a circular disk, slightly recessed into the wall. Horn put his hand over it and tugged at the door handle. It was immovable.
Horn turned back into the room, feeling a moment of security. Where were the technicians? Gone to aid in the search? Or hadn’t they moved in yet? Perhaps the Tube wasn’t ready for operation. Horn felt a flash of panic.
It subsided as he inspected the room. He remembered. This was a dining hall. Plastic plates stacked at the far end of the room for disposal were soiled.
Horn passed through an archway into a room lined with bunks and lockers. Four doors opened off it. The first would be the control room, the second a communications room, the third—
Horn palmed the disk beside the door. The door slid aside. Horn stepped into a huge, domed chamber, nine hundred meters high and almost as wide. Offset a little from the center was a massive, N-iron mounting for a giant, gun-shaped tube. It slanted upward. At a hole even larger than itself, the tube joined the dazzling brilliance of the real Tube. The floor trembled a little, as if the whole thing were in steady movement.
It was, Horn realized. It would have to follow the apparent movement of Eron.
At this end of the metal tube was a hinged cradle. The ships were brought into the cube on the many-wheeled dollies that rolled along the grooved tracks. The cradle lowered to receive them, raised them up, and shoved them forward into the main lock.
Horn ran toward the mounting and scrambled up the ladder welded to one of the beams. The first joint was two hundred meters from the pavement. Railed steps led upward toward the main lock at a thirty-degree angle. At the top was a door. Beside it was a disk. Horn hesitated and palmed it.
Beyond was a small room. The walls were lined with spacesuits, supported at the armpit by pegs. Personnel lock, Horn thought. He closed the door behind him.
He picked out a suit that seemed about the size of the one the Guard had issued him. He got into it with the ease of long practice.
He lowered the plastic helmet over his head and clamped it down. He shoved his hands into the gauntlets and felt them click against the metal cuffs. Gauges reflected their information against the front of the helmet. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two emergency rations. Closures: airtight.
He brushed his hand against the breastplate. The dials vanished. He walked heavily toward a door in the far wall. It slid aside to reveal a narrow cubicle lit by a single glowing plate in the ceiling.
Opposite Horn was another door. He palmed the disk beside it, but it didn’t open. Instead, the door behind him closed. For a moment he stood there helplessly, feeling the sweat begin to trickle down his sides, and then the door slid open. Horn walked into a great tube, half a kilometer long, one hundred meters in diameter.
He began to run toward the far end of the tube, closed by giant doors. When he reached them he was winded again. At eye level, just to the right of the crack between the doors, was another disk. It was red. Above it was printed: DANGER—EMERGENCY.
Horn took a deep breath. Beyond the doors lay the Tube, and the Tube led to Eron, away from Earth and danger.
Was Eron better than Earth? For him, it was. Earth was death. Eron, at least, was uncertainty. Once there, if he could blend into that teeming hive of humanity, he could disappear. They would never find him.
He stood at the mouth of a second, darker tunnel and thought the thoughts he had thought before. Only this tunnel was deadlier. He remembered the buzzard that had flared so brilliantly against the Tube wall. The touch of the Tube was death.
Could he make it in a spacesuit?
Slowly he raised his hand toward the red disk. The metal gauntlet closed over—
He fell, fell into endless night, fell toward Eron, thirty light years away.…
THE HISTORY
Eron.…
Bitter child of a negligent mother. Spawned and forgotten.
Eron. Man’s greatest challenge. Man’s greatest triumph.
You had nothing but hate; that you gave freely. You froze man while he compressed your thin air to make it breathable. You scourged him while he searched futilely for useful minerals and fertile soil. You changed him; you made him as hard and bitter as yourself.
It’s not surprising that he turned from you to the endless seas of space. Trade; raid. There was little difference between them.
Legend says that Roy Kellon found you, but legend is mistress to any man. Why should he have chosen you? Almost any world would have been fairer, sweeter, kinder. And you are nearly thirty light years from Earth, the journey of a weary lifetime.
Eron. Where are you now? Man changed you more than you changed him. He hid you beneath an expanding skin of metal and put you at the center of a star-flung empire. You sit there, tamed, obedient, holding it together with golden strings.
Eron. You are the Hub. All roads lead to you.…
8
OUT OF CHAOS …
Nothing. Nowhere. Lightless, soundless, weightless.… Nothing. Nothing to see or hear or feel. Formless, unreal.… Nothing.
The universe was dark, was dead, was gone. The world had ended.
No stars, no warmth, no life. The night had won, and the light was forever gone. Death had conquered. The great clock of creation had run down. The great energy gradient had been flattened. Hot, cold—there were no words for those. No motion. Nothing.
Infinity was a dark sameness. Here, there—the terms were meaningless. Nowhere was everywhere; everywhere was nowhere.
One consciousness in the eternal night, stunned, reeling, afraid. One life living in the endless death. One thing aware when awareness was futile. One mind thinking when the time for thought was done.
Horn screamed. Soundlessly. Without movement. It was a shocking, mental thing without physical extensions, imprisoned with the narrow, impervious shell of the mind. It was lightning captured in a hollow ball.
No breath dilated his nostrils or stirred his lungs. No pump throbbed rhythmically in his chest. No muscles tensed or relaxed. He was a consciousness, hopelessly alone.
One mind, spinning in infinity.
Think! Think!
Infinity split. Creation!
Consciousness in the womb, weightless, eternally falling, endless distances below, above, around. That’s wrong. Think! No up, no down. All directions were outward.
Consciousness. A mind to think. Existence. Circular proof. Outside of this, nothing.
Birth!
Upon one fact a man can construct a universe. Always one fact, always the same. I think—I am. Reality begins with me. I am the universe! I am the creator.
Create, then. Everything is destroyed but you. There is nothing alive but you. There is no thought, no memory, but yours. Create!
The universe was falling through the void. Falling or weightless? Distinction meaningless: identity. Falling. Hold fast to that. A thing must fall from somewhere, fall to somewhere, fall through something.
Cling to it. Cling to sanity. Create.
Falling from somewhere. From a place of weight and solidity. Earth. Horn created Earth, complete, with green plains and gray mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, blue sky, white clouds, and sunlight. He peopled it with animals and men. Earth. His creation filled him with longing. But Earth was behind him. He was falling from there.
Falling to somewhere. To a place of weight and solidity. Eron. Horn created Eron, complete, steel-jacketed, cold, the hub of a giant wheel, spokes reaching across the stars. Beneath the icy metal skin, he tunneled it out and peopled it with mole-men, scampering blindly through the tunnels. Eron. It was in front of him. He was falling to there.
Falling through something. Falling through one of the golden spokes. The Tube. Horn created the Tube, complete, a golden shimmering of energy outside; within, a black nothingness, an e
mpty, timeless void, foreshortening space or expanding time so that a distance of light years could be spanned in hours. He peopled it with a man, himself. He was falling through it.
Reality. Horn created it.…
Memory returned. With it came sanity. Sensation was still missing, but he had these two, and he must hug them tightly or go mad. He had fallen up into the Tube, up into nothingness and insanity. He was still there, but now he had a mind that worked.
He willed his mind to feel. At the end of eternity, he gave up. Either his mind was isolated or there was nothing to feel.
Eternity. The Tube was timeless, too. Every instant was eternity.
This could be death. Horn considered the possibility calmly. He tossed it away. It was an unprofitable assumption. If true, his condition was unchangeable; if not, his acceptance of it might make it actual.
He was in the Tube. These sensations—or these lacks of sensation—were a result of that; probably they were the effect of it.
He had been in a Tube twice before: going from Quarnon Four to Eron and from Eron to Callisto. Both times he had been unconscious. Gas, he had thought the first time. The second time he had held his breath, lying strapped in the guard-quarters bunk, but it hadn’t delayed the blackness. They could have other means.
He had suspected then that it was a precaution against revealing a clue to the nature of the Tube. Now he was not so sure. It was obviously—if not entirely—a precaution against insanity. He knew himself to be tough-minded, and he had come dangerously close to irreversible madness.
He returned to the problem. He was in the Tube, falling from Earth to Eron. The effects were these: no light, no sound.… Better: no movement. Still better: no energy. Or the effect was this: no sensation.
Was there a way to tell which was the actual state of affairs? The effect on his consciousness would be identical, whether there was no stimulus or no reaction. Or, perhaps, if there is no reaction, the stimulus does not exist. Is there a sound where there are no ears to hear it?
Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.
There should be tests to determine which of the alternatives was true. But how can a mind test anything? The mind has three functions: memory, analysis, and synthesis. Memory.…
A man, dressed in a gray uniform, looking at his watch: “I thought these trips took three hours; not even a minute has passed.”
Analysis.…
1) Eron lied; the trip is instantaneous.
2) The man was mistaken; his watch had stopped.
Synthesis.…
If 1) is true, then these thoughts I am thinking are instantaneous. Can this trip which seems infinitely long be infinitely short? Time is man’s invention, true, and it may not exist in a way we can understand it inside the Tube, but I am conscious of duration, however long. Moreover, instantaneous transmission implies the existence of a thing in two places at the same time. Judgment: implausible.
If 2) is true, then motion ceases inside the Tube. This would include: light, sound, all manifestations of energy, breathing, heartbeats, all internal activity including neural.… Then how do I think? Is intelligence incorporeal? Judgment: more likely.
The hypothesis was self-consistent and fitted the observable phenomena. If it were correct, then both alternatives could be true: there was no stimulus and the senses could not receive impressions and transmit them to the brain. If he could test it—
Horn recognized the familiar wall. At least he had a hypothesis, and that was better than nothing.
The walls—he remembered them suddenly, and he remembered that they were dangerous. He must not touch them. That was the function of the gold bands around the ships, to keep them from touching the walls. But he had no gold bands, and he had no way of keeping away from the walls and no way of knowing when he was close to them. Even now he might be edging close, imperceptibly—
He caught himself and drew back from the edge of panic. It was pointless to worry about the walls. If he touched them, it was all over, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He remembered how the Tube had seemed to taper. He had seen a sketch of a Tube once. He tried to visualize it. It had tapered. Like a tube of glass heated in the middle and pulled at both ends, the Tube had been drawn out to a slender filament. Was it wide enough to let him through?
The ships were much bigger. They got through. But the gold bands could be responsible for that. When he got to the narrowed section—
It was necessary to do something. Fatalism and inactivity might be natural under the circumstances, but they could be disastrous psychologically.
He decided to concentrate on just one sense. He tried to see. And failed, after an eternity of mind-wracking effort. He was troubled, however, by a vague feeling of something impenetrable equidistant on all sides of him. Could that be the Tube? If the mind were something distinct from the brain, could it sense directly, especially in circumstances like these? He accepted the possibility, and saw no way to prove it or put it to use.
The endlessness of the trip oppressed him. Time might be man’s invention and his tool, but it could also be an enemy to destroy him. With nothing to measure its passing, he could grow senile waiting for an instant to elapse. The objective duration of the trip might be three hours; subjectively it was eternity multiplied.
He had escaped one trapdoor to madness only to find himself standing on another. He must keep his mind busy; he must fill eternity with thoughts.
He planned what he would do when he reached Eron. The Tube would take him to one of the Terminal caps at the poles, a cap bristling with Tubes. The caps didn’t rotate with Eron. If they did, the Tubes would soon be twisted together like spaghetti. The broad, spiked caps floated in a shallow pool of mercury. They turned in the opposite direction of Eron’s rotation, or, rather, motors kept them motionless while Eron turned underneath.
The ships pushed through airlocks into the space around Eron. They located their assigned elevator. The massive elevator lowered each ship past level after level until it reached the appropriate one. The freighters went deep, close to the ancient, sterile rock of Eron itself. The fighting ships stopped at the barracks-level. The liners, reserved almost exclusively for the Golden Folk, dropped only a little.
But ships were useless to him. Even if he could steal one and get it into space, he would have no place to go. Not into Eron. The elevators were operated from inside the skin of the world. The nearest planet was years away by conventional drive; he would be recaptured quickly.
There had to be some way to get from the caps to Eron itself, other than by ship. Could he walk out on the surface in his spacesuit and find a way in? No, that wasn’t the way. Even if he could jump from the stationary cap to the spinning world without disaster, he would be dangerously exposed while he was searching for an entrance, if any.
There should be a direct connection. Not at the perimeter, although the relative motion would not be so great after all. If the caps were fifty kilometers in diameter and Eron rotated as rapidly as Earth, the relative motion would be less than seven kilometers an hour. But it would be awkward, waiting for doorways to align themselves; Eron would never plan it like that.
The nearer a man approached the pole, on the other hand, the less the linear velocity would be until it dropped away to zero directly over the pole. There, if anywhere, should be an entrance to Eron. Horn planned, in as much detail as his knowledge of Eron permitted, how he would get to Eron from the cap and what he would do when he got there.
But he could never quite forget the mouse of insanity nibbling at the edges of his mind. How swift is thought? How slow is time? How long is three hours?
The insensate mind that called itself Horn floated blind and helpless within a formless area, carried along by an unfelt force toward a shrinking goal. Only faith could sustain i
t, and the only faith it had was in itself.
It was irony, Horn thought, that when he was most alone, most independent of outside influences, he was unable to react with his environment; a completely isolated individual, he could not move a muscle, he could not alter his circumstances in any way. Perhaps there is a lesson in that, he thought.
Maybe it would have been better to have believed in something, he reflected, even though belief is a form of surrender to the universe. It might have sustained him now, if he could believe, as the Entropy Cult preached, that there was a great, beneficent force behind the apparent aimlessness of the wheel of creation.
He did believe in something: he believed in Eron, in its skill and its power. When Eron built something, it worked; the Tube worked, and it would take him to Eron. But believing in Eron was only a form of believing in himself; it was believing in his senses, his judgment, the validity of the external environment.
How swift is thought? How long to Eron?
It was not such a bad thing to believe in: himself. Would he have got so far if he hadn’t, if he had believed in something else instead? He knew that he would not. It had saved him from self-pity, from easy satisfaction, and from soft acceptance, this belief that a man’s fate is in his own two hands. Few things are impossible; fewer are inevitable.
It had taken him to wealth three times; twice he had tossed it away riotously. The third time he had wasted it fighting a futile war with Eron. It had taken him into countless adventures on a dozen worlds in the Cluster, found profit in them, and brought him out again. It had taken him three hundred light years across the Empire to Earth and a rendezvous with assassination.
The only way to get to Earth had been through Eron. Horn had taken advantage of the general amnesty to enlist in the Guard. After brief training on Quarnon Four and a taste of the fierce discipline enforced by barbarian mercenaries, Horn had been shipped to Eron. There he was handed over to the molding hands of Eron’s drillmasters.
