Sphere Nine was in top order; the ravaged computations room had been set aright; the crew of ordinaries had been given a going-over by Mamie Tung and pronounced sound and trustworthy. The Officers themselves were high as so many kites, reaction-speeds fast and true, toned-up to the limit. It was to be regretted that the strain of contact with the Gentleman had vanished, perhaps. A certain recklessness had crept into their manner.
The protoplasmal mass which blanketed their heavens at one stroke became instead the floor beneath their feet as its gravity twisted their psychology 180 degrees around. They felt as through they hung above a sea of dry slime that moved not at all, whose sole activity was the emission of cosmic rays and invisible spores of life that smeared any agar dish exposed to it.
Quietly the sphere lowered itself, quietly touched the surface of the sea, quietly slipped into it, the path it made closing behind.
Through layers of dark-colored stuff they drifted, then through layers of lighter-colored stuff, then into a sort of ash heap. Embedded in the tough jelly-like matter were meteors by the thousand, planet fragments, areas of frozen gas. It was like the kitchen-midden of a universe.
The strange, silent passage through the viscid medium was uninterrupted; Star Macduff plotted a course through the rubbish. The ratings steered faithfully by his figures; as they passed the gravelly stuff, the dream-like progress continued, the protoplasm growing lighter yet in color. Finally unmistakable radiance shone through a thinning layer.
Sphere Nine broke through the tough, slimy-dry stuff to be bathed in the light of a double star with a full retinue of fifteen planets.
"Impossible," said Star Macduff.
"Agreed. But why?"
"Assuming that a star should coincide with another long enough to draw out a filament of matter sufficient for fifteen planets, the system would be too unstable—wouldn't last long enough to let the suns get into the red giant stage."
"Artificial?"
"If they're real they're artificial, Will."
"Attention E.O.! Attention!" gargled the phone hysterically.
"What is it?"
"Rating Eight speaking, Officer. There's something coming at the forward slice."
Will Archer swiveled around the telescope while the rating gave the coordinates of whatever they had picked up. Archer finally found it and held it. It was a spiral of some kind headed at them, obviously, speed more than a mile a second and decelerating.
"Stop ship. Cut."
"Cut, Officer."
"That thing can't reach us for a while yet. Meantime let's consider what we just got ourselves into."
"We just got ourselves through a big slew of protoplasm that acts as a sort of heavenly sphere—primum mobile—for a solar system that our Calculator considers unlikely."
"True. I suggest that we keep ourselves very carefully in check now.
There's been some laxity of thinking going on during the voyage; it is understandable. We've all been under extraordinary stress. Now that the hardest part—perhaps—is over, we cannot afford to relax. By all accounts what is coming at us is a vessel. It is unlikely to suppose that this protosphere is accidental; if it were, there would be as much reason to believe that there is intelligent life on those fifteen planets, inasmuch as they are so close to the source of life-spores. I hope that in whatever befalls us we shall act as worthy representatives of our species."
"Pompous ass!" rang through the ship. The E.O. turned very red.
"May we come aboard?" asked the laughing voice again.
"By all means," said the psychologist. "It would be somewhat foolish to deny you entrance when you've already perfected communications."
"Thank you."
There slipped through the hull of the sphere three ordinary-looking persons of approximately the same build as Will Archer. They were conventionally dressed.
"How did you do that?" asked the Calculator.
"Immaterial. The matter, I mean. I mean, the topic," said one of them.
"That's one fiendish language you speak. The wonder is that you ever managed to get off the ground."
"If our intrusion into your solar system is resented," said the E.O., "we'll leave at once. If it is not, we should like to examine that shell you have.
We would gratefully accept any knowledge you might offer us from your undoubtedly advanced civilization."
"Eh? What's that?"
"He means," explained another of the visitors to the sphere, "that we're stronger than he is, and that he'd like to become strong enough to blow us to powder."
"Why didn't he say so?" asked the second.
"Can't imagine. Limitations of his symbology, I expect. Now, man, can you give us a good reason why we should help you become strong enough to blow us to powder?" Stiffly Archer nodded to Mamie Tung.
"We have no claim on you, nor have you on us. We wish to take a sample of your protosphere and depart for our own system."
"In other words, my good woman, you realize that time doesn't figure largely in this matter, and that you don't care whether you or your grandchildren blow us to powder?"
"I can't understand it," commented one of the others in a stage whisper.
"Why this absurd insistence on blowing us to powder?"
"Do I pretend to understand the processes of a lump of decaying meat?"
declared the first. "I do not."
"No more than I. What makes them go?"
"Something they call 'progress.' I think it means blowing everything else to powder."
"What unpleasantness!"
"So I should say. What do you propose doing to them?"
"We might blow them to powder."
"Let's find out first what makes them run." The first turned on Yancey Mears. "Why are you built differently from the E.O.? We can allow for individual variations, but even to this untrained eye there's a staggering discrepancy."
Yancey Mears explained that she was a woman and calmly went into details, interrupted occasionally by gurgling noises from the boarders.
Finally it was too much; the three visitors broke into cries for mercy between bellows of laughter.
"And you thought they were humorless!" accused the third.
"This one's probably a comic genius. Though why they'd send a comic genius on an expedition of this kind I don't know. You—you don't suppose that it's all true—do you?
Suddenly sobered they inspected Yancey and the Psychologist, exchanging significant nods.
"Well …though you things are the most ludicrous sights of an abnormally long lifetime we're prepared to be more than equitable with you. Our motivation is probably far beyond your system of ethics—
being, as it is, a matter of blowing things to powder—but we can give you a hint of it by saying that it will help as a sort of self-discipline.
Beyond that, you will have to discover for yourself.
"What we propose for you is a thing much more gentle than being blown into powder. With courage, ability, common sense and inspiration you will emerge unharmed."
"Go on," said the Psychologist.
"Go on? It's begun already. We'll take our leaves now."
As his two companions slipped through the hull of the sphere, the last of the boarders turned to Yancey Mears.
"Er—what you were saying—it was a comic monologue, wasn't it?"
"No. It was strict biological truth."
The boarder wistfully asked: "I don't suppose I could see it done?
Thought not. Good day." The three departed abruptly as they had come.
"What's begun already?" Star Macduff asked the Executive.
"I don't know. What do you suppose we've come into contact with now?"
"They're hard to size up," said Mamie Tung. "The humor—it's very disturbing. Apparently it didn't take them more than a few minutes to pick up our entire language and system of thought. It wasn't a simple job of mind-reading; they obviously grasped symbology, as well. They said so themselves."
"And what d
o you suppose they really look like?" asked Star in a thin, hysterical tone.
"Shut it," ordered Will Archer. "That's panic-mongering, pure and simple. Normally, I'd order you back with the ratings for a comment like that. Since we're up against extraordinary circumstances, I'll stay execution for the duration of the emergency."
The Calculator did not reply; he seemed scarcely to have heard the rebuke. He was staring abstractedly at nothing. The notion overcame the three other Officers slowly—very slowly—that something was amiss.
Yancey Mears first felt physically sick; then a peculiar numbness between the eyes, then a dull, sawing pain that ran over her whole skull.
She blinked her eyes convulsively; felt vertiginous yet did not fall; felt a curious duplicate sensation, as though she were beside herself and watching her body from outside—as though all lights she saw were doubled, as though the mass of her body was twice what it had been.
Alarmed, she reached out for Will Archer's arm. It was not till she had tried the simple gesture that she realized how appallingly askew everything was. She reached, she thought, but her hands could not coordinate; she thought that she had extended both hands instead of one. But she had not. Dizzily she looked down, saw that her left hand lay against her body; that her right hand was extended, reaching for Archer; that her left hand was extended and that her right hand lay against her body …
"Will, what's wrong?" The dizziness, the fear, the panic, doubled and tripled, threatened to engulf her. For her voice was not her own but a double voice, coming from two throats, one a little later than the other.
"Will …" No, she couldn't outrace the phenomenon; her voice was doubled in some insane fashion. She felt cold, tried to focus her eyes on Archer. Somehow the blackness of space seemed to come between them.
She heard a scream—two screams—from Star. She saw him, blending with the space-black cloud in her vision, staggering in the officers'
quarters, yawing wildly from side to side, trying to clutch at a stanchion or a chair. She saw two Stars, sometimes superimposed, sometimes both blurred, staggering wildly.
She saw Will Archer drag himself across the floor—both of him, their faces grim. The two Will Archers blended somehow with the space-blackness, waveringly. They methodically picked up a cabinet from the desk and clubbed at the raving figures of Star Macduff.
The two Archers connected with one of the Macduffs, stretching it out on the floor.
Yancey saw the other Macduff, distance-obscured, stop short and rub its head amazedly, heard it say in a thin, faraway voice: "Sorry I made a fool of myself, Will …" then look about in terror, collapsing into a chair.
Only Madame Tung was composed. Only Madame Tung crossed legs on a chair, shut her eyes and went into a deep, complicated meditation.
"Close your eyes, everybody," she called in two voices. "If you value your sanity, close your eyes and rest quietly."
The Clericalist tried to walk across the floor to a chair, had the utterly horrifying sensation of walking across the floor in two different directions and sitting down in two different chairs. Realizing only that there were two of her, she tried to make one rise and join the other, found that she could not.
"Stop it, Yancey," said the two voices of Madame Tung. "Sit down. Shut your eyes." Yancey Mears sat down and shut her eyes—all four of them.
She was trembling with shock, did her best not to show it.
"Will," called the Psychologist. "You have the best motor control of any of us. Will you try very hard to coordinate sufficiently to prop up Star?"
The Executive Officer grimly, carefully stepped across the two floors. As vertigo overcame him he fell sprawling and hitched the rest of the way.
The problem loomed enormously in his mind: Which one was him?
Which of the two Stars he saw was real? Which Will had knocked down which Star?
He tried to reach out and touch the Star that lay on the floor as the other Star watched, horrified, from against a stanchion.
He tried to reach out and touch this Star, snatched back his hand as though coals of fire had burned it, for there swept over him the blackness of space, the dead-black nothingness of something unspeakable and destroying.
Madame Tung, watching his every move, snapped: "No—the other you—see if you can control and differentiate."
Will reached out again, again he recoiled. He tried to blank out his mind completely, feeling that he was losing himself in a welter of contradictions impossible for anyone in his confused state to handle.
Lying on the floor, breathing deeply, he succeeded in calming himself a little—enough to send the slow oblivion of self-hypnosis flowing through his mind. He forced the Nepenthe on himself, leaving only a thin thread of consciousness by which to govern his actions.
When it was over, he remembered that one of his duplex person had remained on the floor and that the other had carried the unconscious Star to a seat.
"Good work, Will. Very good. Now see if you can superimpose yourself."
He tried, tried like a madman to bring those two parts of himself together. He tried, though a world of blackness lay between them and the very attempt was full of horror and dark mystery. By the same technique as before, he succeeded—at a cost that nearly left him shattered in mind. He breathed heavily and sweated from every square inch of skin.
Mamie Tung focused her eyes on the two figures, noted that there was the feeling of strabismus. As closely as she could figure it, the two into which everything had separated were divided by some unimaginable gulf. It was not space, for all the sense of blackness and cold. It could not be time; the mind rejected the insane paradoxes of "time travel"
instinctively, and there was a certain definite grasp that one had on this phenomenon, something just out of the range of human comprehension …
"Star," she snapped. "Star, will you stop your sniveling for a while?"
"Yes. Oh, oh yes," yammered the Calculator senselessly, his fear-struck eyes clinging to her bowed, black ones.
"Star, can you calculate the way you feel?" There was no answer but terror; she cursed briefly and violently, then fixed her eyes again on the computator, herself fighting the weird sensation of duality.
"I'm going to cure you, Star," she said in a droning, insistent voice.
Macduff stared helplessly; he was in no condition either to resist the hypnosis or to cooperate.
In two minutes of fearful concentration she had put him under and well into the secondary stage. His body stiffened cateleptically against the wall. At that moment his other body, laid out in the chair, chose to moan and stir.
"Club it again, Will!" she snapped, not letting her gaze swerve from her patient. "Put it out for good if you can!"
She did not see the heroic effort of the Executive Officer, but it was an epic in the few feet of space he traversed to the spot on the floor where he had dropped the case. It was a feat of arms equal to any Arthurian myth, how he picked the thing up with hands that would not behave, and eyes that would not see straight, and a mind that reeled under horrible vistas.
The Executive Officer, feeling his grip going, moved too quickly and blundered into half a dozen obstacles—chairs and desks that should not be in his path—before he reached the moaning figure of the second Star. Twice he struck and missed, bringing the case down on an empty chair. With the last dyne of his psychological reserve he raised the case, brought it down with a solid chunk, brought it down biting into the skull of the mathematician.
Mamie Tung smiled grim satisfaction and proceeded with the treatment. It was a technique of her own, something fearfully obscure and delicate, unbearably complicated by the duality imposed on her.
But the drive of the woman brought about nearly an elimination of one of her components, drove it into the back of her mind where it stood as little more than a shadow. The other Madame Tung was coldly, stonily, picking over the brain of Star Macduff.
She drove a tentacle of consciousness into the hypnotize
d man, tapped his personal memory-store. She had no interest in that at the moment; drove deeper, reached one obscure group of neurones specialized in the calculus of relationships, alias symbolic logic, alias the scientific method, alias common sense.
Vampirish, she drew at the neurones, what they held, how they worked, what they did, why they did it so much better than any of the other officers' corresponding groups. And it came like a flood of golden light, like the ever-new sensation that comes when an old thing looks different.
She let go of the cataleptic figure completely, let it crumple to the floor, while she busied herself with the unfamiliar tools of the Calculator. It was all new to her, and it is to be remarked greatly to her credit that she did not go mad.
"I've worked it, Will," she said. "Slick as a whistle."
"Speak up then." The E.O. was very near collapse; Yancey Mears—one of them—had fallen to the floor and was big-eyed and heaving in the chest while the other wandered about distraitly raving under her breath, sounding very far away.
"It's probabilities, Will. Those people—they worked space around for us so that when we came to some decision-point we took not one course or another but both. Since we aren't used to that kind of thinking, it didn't pan out—and a couple of us are nearly done in by it.
"Star's math says it's completely plausible, and the wonder is that they don't do it on Earth for difficult situations, social and otherwise.
Imagine the joy of attending on the same night a necessary academic banquet and taking out a lover. I must be raving. But it's the goods, Will.
Everything fits."
"What was the decision-point?"
"It was when Star made that fool remark about what our boarders really looked like. You called him down, torn between sending him aft with the ordinaries and keeping him here with the superiors. Conveniently for you we—the ship—branched into two probabilities at that point.
You could have covered yourself by both ordering him aft with the ordinaries and keeping him here with the superiors. Justice would be done and we'd be insured against the chance of a poor decision.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 104
