The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  “—And it has happened, or is happening,” Shania cut in. “Not here but out there. Once the process reached its critical stage there was no stopping it. How may I best illustrate it? Ah, yes! What would happen if you were to arm a hand grenade, then fail to throw it?”

  “It would blow me to bits,” Trask answered.

  And Goodly said, “Or in that Gelka creature’s case, to her elemental gases!”

  Still Trask wasn’t satisfied. “Okay, but unless my memory is playing tricks with me you also said that after the Big Bang there would be nothing. You said the Big Bang would be followed by a Big Nothing, right?”

  Goodly sighed, shrugged, shook his head. “Ben, you know as much about all this as I do. I’m at a loss as to how to explain it. And so I’m obliged to agree with you—that maybe this time I was wrong.”

  “Oh, I’m not saying you were wrong,” said Trask. “But I am concerned that you might yet prove to be right!”

  The precog frowned. “Come again?”

  At which Trask queried, “Ian, now tell me: is the future a devious thing, or isn’t it?”

  “It definitely is,” said Goodly.

  “In which case,” said Trask, nodding, “mightn’t everything depend on the nature of ‘nothing’?”

  The precog’s frown deepened, but right then, in the moment before he could answer Trask, the NOTHING they had been talking about happened . . .

  And at that same “moment”—if time has any meaning at all in the universe men think they know—Scott and Wolf arrived back in the great cavern to a scene that was scarcely believable.

  Shania, her mouth and gorgeous eyes wide open in astonishment, moved, flying into Scott’s arms; but apart from Wolf and Scott St. John himself—oh, and a myriad golden darts—Shania was the only flesh and blood creature, indeed the only thing, that moved at all! And all around the three, hurtling at such astonishing velocity that their trails filled the cavern with a crisscross weave of warm golden light, the darts sped from person to person and mind to mind, doing what they’d said must be done: “cleaning up” after the work that Scott’s Three Unit, Ben Trask and his team, and the vengeful dead from the cryogenic level and the disc on the dais had done here.

  But as for everything and everyone else in the cavern:

  They were frozen in time. Time itself was frozen! Smoke from the pit of ashes that once contained gold hung in the air as if painted there, the beam of daylight from the ceiling hole held dust motes in stasis, and while the air for everyone else was solid—its molecules unmoving, as if set as in invisible concrete—still Scott, his Two, and his Three breathed freely.

  Then something inside Scott said, Time to go home.

  “But Trask and his people, and—” he began to reply.

  Don’t concern yourself, said the voice from inside; that familiar voice, of a boy, then a man, then more than a man, and now a revenant. But a different kind of revenant, one who knew that death isn’t like that.

  “But what’s happening?”

  You don’t understand? The voice seemed surprised. Shania’s Khiff understood. Why, we might even say that she supplied the solution!

  And now, too, Scott understood. “You’re saying they won’t remember all of this? You’ve taken it away from them? But why? Was it all for nothing?”

  And so the voice explained:

  How other races would one day find their way here, perhaps even Shing’t survivors like Shania Two, who were off-world when their planet was destroyed. But if or when they did—how would the peoples of Earth greet them if what had happened in Schloss Zonigen was known by all or even by any?

  Well, it would be known by some, but only by a small, very small deserving few—say three?—but no more than that. And:

  I can’t wait around much longer, said the voice. There are other places I need to be. So now, use the Möbius Continuum for the very last time, Scott, and go home.

  Scott looked this way and that. The weave of golden light continued its frenzied activity in this otherwise timeless cavern. People and things were vanishing—the dead, Ben Trask and his crew, the ashes in the trench—and the hole in the ceiling was resealing itself!

  “Okay,” Scott said breathlessly, “we’ll go home. But first I’d like to know why you’re allowing us to see this, why we get to remember.”

  But isn’t that obvious? the dart answered. When the others come—which they will, eventually, for there are a great many races out there in the stars—they may need someone like you, Scott, and especially Shania, to vouchsafe them. We understand, of course, that it may not happen in your time, but then again it may. And something else . . . (now the dart hovered over Wolf). Not all of the species out there are bipedal. Not very many of them, in fact. That’s just one more reason why your Three Unit makes perfect sense to us!

  Scott looked at Shania, who said, “We should go home now.”

  Scott nodded, conjured a Möbius door, and took his Two and Three home with him. On their way, instead of performing an instantaneous transfer, he paused to say: Suddenly I’m reminded of something. When Harry showed me future time there came a point when everything stopped. But as we now know, everything hasn’t stopped. What do you make of that?

  And Shania answered, Gelka Mordri was intending to hook up to the enormous sublevel gravity wave caused by her explosion. Perhaps the sublevel she chose had a connection to the Möbius Continuum.

  You’re saying that maybe her Big Bang caused a disruption here in the Continuum, too?

  Possibly, she replied. Or there again, perhaps when those dart intelligences stopped time in the great cavern, it stopped here also. They do after all use the Continuum. Maybe they’re a part of it, with a measure of control over it.

  So time stopped for everthing else, but not for us? Still Scott was baffled, and the smallest part of him that was Harry Keogh scarcely seemed interested, was gradually fading from his no longer metaphysical mind.

  Ah! said Shania. But time’s a funny thing. Maybe it didn’t stop at all but we simply speeded up! I’m sorry, Scott, but my knowledge of the sciences—and especially metaphysics—isn’t all that it should be.

  Oh, really? he said. Then what does that make me? And then he laughed, but silently, of course . . .

  As the trio emerged from the Möbius Continuum in Scott’s study, Harry Keogh’s golden dart—his sentient remnant—left Scott and hovered at eye level in the early dawn light coming through the windows. And a second dart, which might have been its twin, issued from Wolf. There they hung in midair, turning on their axes, first this way then that, as if choosing a direction. But at the last moment—

  A third dart—smaller, the merest sliver—split off from the side of Harry’s dart, and turned to point its sharp prow at Shania. And she gasped, clinging to Scott as a small but oh-so-well remembered voice said, And so we do go on. Good-bye my Shania.

  And then indeed they were gone—all “three,” of course—passing out through the unbroken pane and disappearing over the misted garden . . .

  That night—or perhaps the previous night, or possibly a night some time previous to that, time not being what it is—on the flat roof of E-Branch HQ in the heart of London:

  Ben Trask, his principal ESPers and techs, even the Minister Responsible, sat around a blazing brazier sipping from thin-stemmed glasses or simply warming their hands. On a table close by, several bottles of wine stood mainly empty. The fire in the brazier consisted of—

  “What?” said Trask, leaning forward as a thick file burst into flame. “What are we burning here?”

  “Old stuff,” said Paul Garvey.

  “Out-of-date stuff, I think,” David Chung added. “It was a good idea of . . . of yours, boss?” The locator seemed uncertain as he glanced through the leaping flames at Trask.

  “Yes, your idea, definitely,” said Millie Cleary, smiling prettily. “And I think a celebration is perfectly in order.”

  “But a celebration of . . . ?” said Trask, feeling that there
was something more than a little out of order here, but unable to say what it was.

  Seated next to Trask, the Minister Responsible beamed and said, “Why, of my getting your funding doubled, of course!”

  As another file went up in flames, Trask tried to read its title off the card cover but managed only a single word or name—“Scott,” or maybe just “Scot”—before the card blackened and curled up on itself. “Scotland Yard,” maybe? Most probably. But in any case . . . he shrugged and let it go.

  And raising his glass, he said, “Very well then, here’s to us, and here’s to E-Branch!” But turning to the precog and seeing his forehead wrinkled in seeming concentration, “Oh?” Trask queried. “Well, my gloomy-looking friend, what is it now?”

  “Eh?” The precog gave a start. “I’m sorry, I was . . . somewhere else entirely!” He looked at the glass in his hand. “This must be very good stuff. It’s quite taken me out of myself!”

  “But you’re sure there’s nothing troubling you?” Trask was still trying to allay that small, nagging suspicion of his own, that something wasn’t ringing entirely true here.

  “No, nothing.” Goodly shook his head. “Nothing whatever—not that I know of.”

  “Just a Big Nothing, eh?” Trask tilted his glass, pausing a moment to look at the stars.

  “Right,” said Goodly, smiling a rare smile. “Just a great Big Nothing.” For whatever it was that had been bothering him, it was there no longer. And not surprising, really, for being the precog it was the future rather than the past that concerned Ian Goodly. It was the future that was devious—

  —Usually.

  But as for the immediate or close future:

  The brief gamma-ray burst that was recorded by scientists a little later, which had its source in the Cassiopeian region of the sky, was believed to have been a) the faint echoes of a supernova at the outermost limits of space, or b) some smaller cosmic catastrophe closer to home, possibly the collision of a comet or mass of “dark matter” with a wandering black hole.

  As for how close to home—

  —The world would never know . . .