Thoughtfully, he eased the clutch of the automatic half-circle into the steering shaft. It whirred and then went ticaticatac a hundred and eighty times, very fast. The stars reeled, but settled into steadiness as the stop watch showed three seconds. A perfect hairpin turn in twelve hundred million miles. At that rate he would be within sight of Earth’s sun in another twenty-two days. No, wait! It wasn’t as simple as that.
He couldn’t subject himself again to the kind of pressure that had held him unconscious so long. After some estimations , he set the drive lever at three quarters reverse. And waited. The question was, how soon had he recovered consciousness after the pressure stopped? Two hours passed, and still nothing had happened. His head kept drooping, his eyes closing. But the blow of deceleration didn’t come.
Uneasily expectant, Hedrock finally went to sleep on one of the couches.
There was a jar that shook his bones. Hedrock awakened with a start, but he calmed swiftly as he felt the steady pressure on his body. It was strong, like the current of a very heavy wind. But now that he had taken the first shock, it was bearable. He ached to leap up and examine the speedometer. But he held himself where he was. He was acutely conscious of the tingling readjustments going on in his body, the electronic, atomic, molecular, neural, muscular readjustments. He gave himself thirty minutes before moving. Then he headed for the control boards and peered into the ’stats. But there was nothing to see.
The calendar said August 29th, 11:03 p.m., and the speedometer was down to three hundred and fifty million miles. At his present deceleration, the lifeboat should come to a full stop in about thirty-two days, at most.
The third day also showed a reduction of more than eleven million miles a second. The hollow feeling went slowly out of him, as he watched the average of deceleration develop steadily hour by dragging hour. It grew increasingly clear that, above three hundred and fifty million miles a second, increases and decreases in speed must be governed by far more potent laws than they were here. Four times as much at least, though there seemed to be an upper limit.
As the days dragged by, Hedrock watched the light on the speedometer grow darker, darker, until the beam of force quivered gently, and stopped.
He was lost. Lost in a night that grew more meaningless every hour. He slept restlessly, then returned to the control chair.
He had barely settled into it when there was a jar that shook every plate in the lifeboat-The little craft spun like driftwood in a whirlpool. It was the chair that saved Hedrock, the all-purpose chair. Light as thistledown, it twisted as fast as the ship, holding him always downward and steady; and with him the entire control board.
The surrounding space was aswarm with monstrously large torpedo-shaped ships. Every ‘star showed dozens of the mile-long things; and each stupendous machine was drawn up as part of a long line that completely enveloped his small craft. Out of that mass of machines came a thought. It boiled into the control room like an atomic gas bubble. It was so strong that, for an instant, it had no coherency. And even when it did, it was a long moment before Hedrock’s staggered mind grasped that the titanic thought was not for him, but about him.
“—an inhabitant of ...!!!—meaningless ... Intelligence type nine hundred minus .. .. Study value Tension 1... Shall it be destroyed?”
The mad, private thought that came to Hedrock, as he sat there with tottering reason, was that this was the relation-value of all that desperate fighting on Earth to suppress the interstellar drive. It didn’t matter.
It was too late. Man was too slow by a measureless time. Greater beings had long since grasped all of the universe that they desired, and the rest would be doled out according to their savage will ... Too late, too late—
Eleven
IT COULD HAVE BEEN ONE MINUTE OR MANY THAT PASSED AS Hedrock sat there.
When he finally began to observe again, he had the sensation of emerging from darkness. His will to live surged up into a bright pattern of purpose. His gaze narrowed on the ’stat plates. They were like windows through which he peered out at the mass of spaceships that surrounded him. The fear that came was not for himself, but for man. There were so many, too many. The implication of their presence was deadly.
But he was alive. The conscious, second thought of life galvanized him. His fingers flashed toward the controls. He glanced along the sighting guides, aimed at an opening between two of the massive vessels, plunged home the adjuster, waited an instant for the lifeboat to swing into line—and deliberately snapped the white accelerator far over.
His mind made a pause, for there was darkness, a gulf of physical, not mental darkness. Hedrock tore the drive out of gear. He recalled after a, blank moment that there had been the faintest tug of movement.
Now, there was nothing—no ships, no stars. Nothing at all. It wasn’t that the ’stats were blank. They were on. But they registered blackness unqualified by light. After a moment, he touched a button on the instrument board. Almost immediately a word glowed up at him. It said simply: Metal.
Metal! Surrounded by metal. That meant he was inside one of the mile-long alien ships. Just how it had been done was a mystery, but if the Weapon Makers on Earth had a vibratory transmission system, whereby material objects could be sent through walls and over distances, then the absorption of his lifeboat into the hold of a bigger machine was well within the realm of possibility.
He felt torn by a soaring comprehension of his situation. He was obviously a prisoner, and in due course would learn his fate. They were letting him live—which must mean that he had been found of some value.
Hedrock climbed into a space-suit. He felt tense but very determined.
Ready finally, he opened the air lock, and stood for a moment thinking bleakly of how far he was from the earth. And then he stepped down and out. There was no gravity, and so he floated down under the impetus of a push on the lock. His flashlight blazed an intense path downward, revealing a flat plain of metal, with walls sharply delineated in the near distance, walls with doors in them.
The picture was normal, even ordinary. He need only try all the doors, and if one opened, follow through. The first door opened effortlessly. After a moment, his nervous reflexes caught up with his staggered mind, and he felt an intense wonder. He was staring down at a city from a height of about two miles. The city glittered and shone from a blaze of hidden light, and it was set in a garden of trees and shrubs in bloom. Beyond was green countryside, bright with a profusion of brush and meadows and sparkling streams. The whole curved gently upward into a haze of distance on the three sides that he could see. Except for the limited horizon, it could have been Earth.
The second tremendous shock struck Hedrock at that point. A city, he thought, an Earth-like city in a ship so big that—his mind couldn’t grasp it. The spaceship, which had seemed a mile long, was actually at least fifty, and it was cruising through space with several hundred of its kind, each machine the size of a planetoid, and manned by super beings.
Hedrock remembered his purpose. He held his thought on a cold, practical level as he estimated the size of the largest door. It seemed to him that it was large enough. He went back to the lifeboat. He had a moment of doubt as to whether the mysterious beings would permit it to move. It all depended on what they wanted him to do. His doubt ended as the little machine slipped gently forward, cleared the door by several feet, and landed a few minutes later on the outskirts of the city.
Safely landed, he sat there, letting the unpleasant thrill tingle along his nerves, the realization that this was what they wanted. There was no doubt that some over-all purpose was being worked on him; and while precautions seemed ridiculous, nevertheless they must be taken. He tested the atmosphere. Air pressure was slightly over fourteen pounds, oxygen content was nineteen percent, nitrogen seventy-nine percent, temperature seventy-four, and gravitational pressure 1G. He stopped there, because the figures were the same as for Earth.
Hedrock divested himself of his spacesuit. The possibility
of resistance did not exist. Creatures who could casually, in minutes, recreate an Earth setting for him had him, had him. He stepped out of the lifeboat into silence. Ahead were empty streets that stretched on every side, a deserted city. There was not a breeze, not a movement. The nearby trees stood in the deathly quiet, their leaves curled stiffly, their branches steady. It was like a scene under glass, a garden in a bottle, and he the tiny figure standing rigidly. Only he wasn’t going to stand there.
He came to a white, glistening building, wide and long but not very high. His knock made a hollow sound, and after a moment he tried the latch. The door opened and revealed, without any preliminary of vestibule or hallway, a small metal room. There was a control board, and a multipurpose chair, and a man sitting in the chair. Hedrock stopped as he saw that it was he, himself, sitting there, and that this was a replica of his spaceboat. Hedrock walked forward stiffly, half expecting the body to vanish as he approached. But it didn’t. He expected his hand to pass through that false version of his own body. But it didn’t. The feel of the clothes was unmistakable, and the flesh of the face was warm with life as he touched it with his fingers. The Hedrock who was in the chair paid no attention but continued to stare fixedly at the general ’stat plate.
Hedrock followed that intent gaze, and sighed when he saw the Empress’ passionately earnest face image on it. So they were re-enacting Innelda’s final order to him, without sound effects, without her vibrant voice urging him to land the space-boat. He waited, wondering what was next on the program, but though several minutes went by the scene did not change.
His patience was considerable, but finally he backed away toward the door. Outside, he paused to realize how rigid his muscles had become. It was a figment that he had seen, he told himself tautly, a scene out of his memory recreated in some fashion. But why that scene? Why any?
On impulse he opened the door again, and peered inside. The room was empty. He closed the door, walked swiftly into the city, and felt the silence again like a pall around him. Slowly, he relaxed. Because he must face every facet of strangeness that his unseen captors had in store for him.
Something about him had roused their interest, and it was up to him to force issues and so hold their attention until he had discovered the secret of their control over him .. Hedrock turned abruptly into the imposing entrance of a thirty-story marble skyscraper. The ornate door opened like the one in the first building he had entered, not into an anteroom, but directly into a room. It was a larger chamber than the first. There were guns in floor and wall showcases, and in the corner sat a man opening a letter. The first shock had already come to Hedrock. This was the Linwood Weapon Shop, and the man in the corner was Daniel Neelan. The interview scene between Neelan and himself was about to be re-enacted.
He walked forward, conscious that something was wrong with the picture. It was not quite as he remembered it. He realized abruptly what was wrong. Neelan had not been reading a letter when they first met.
Was it possible that this was something that had happened afterwards?
As he paused directly behind the seated Neelan, and glanced at the letter the other was holding, Hedrock realized that it was very possible indeed. The envelope had a Martian post-office mark on it.
This was the mail that the Weapon Shops had offered to obtain for Neelan, and this was Neelan after the two of them had been to 1874Trellis Minor Building .
But how was it being done? It was one thing to build up a scene which they had obtained from his memory, quite another to enact something in which he had not participated, and which had taken place countless light years away, and nearly two months ago. Yet there must be a reason why they were performing so difficult a feat for his benefit. He decided that his captors wanted him to read the letter that Neelan had received.
He was bending forward to read it when there was a momentary blur before his eyes. It ended, and he realized he was sitting down instead of standing, and that he himself was now holding the letter. The changeover was so startling that Hedrock involuntarily turned in the chair and looked behind him.
For long moments he stared at the body of himself that stood there, rigid, leaning slightly forward, eyes fixed and unwinking; and then, slowly, he faced about again, and stared down—at Neelan’s clothes, Neelan’s hands and Neelan’s body. He began to feel the difference, to become aware of Neelan’s thoughts and intense emotional interest in the letter.
Before Hedrock could more than realize that somehow—somehow— his “mind” had been put into Neelan’s body, Neelan was concentrating on the letter. It was from his brother Gil, and it read:
Dear Dan:
Now I can tell you about the greatest invention in the history of the human race.
I had to wait till now, a few hours before we leave, because we could not take the risk of the letter being intercepted. We want to present the world with a fait accompli. When we come back, we intend to shout our news from the housetops, and have endless film and other records to support our story. But to get down to facts.
There are seven of us, headed by the famous scientist, Derd Kershaw. Six of us are science specialists.
The seventh is a fellow called Greer, a sort of general handy man who keeps the books and the records, who turns on the automatic cookers, and so on. Kershaw is teaching him how to operate the controls, so that the rest of us can be relieved of that chore—
Hedrock-Neelan paused there, sick to his soul. “The children!” he muttered huskily. “Those damned grown-up children.” After a moment he thought: So Greer was a handy man. No wonder the man had known nothing about science.
He was about to read on, when Hedrock momentarily disentangled his ego from that compound awareness. He thought, almost blankly, But Neelan didn’t know about Greer. How could he have a feeling about him? That was as far as he got. Neelan’s compulsion to continue reading the letter overwhelmed his will to separate thought. They read on: I got into the affair as a result of Kershaw noticing an article of mine in the Atomic Journal, in which I described that I had been doing some contraterrene research exactly along the lines of an idea that he had for the development of his invention.
Right here I might as well say that the chance of this discovery being duplicated by other researchers is practically nil . It embraces, in its conception, too many specialized fields. You know what we were taught during our training period, that there are nearly five hundred thousand special science fields, and that undoubtedly by skilful coordination of knowledge countless new inventions would be forthcoming, but that no known mind training could ever coordinate a fraction of these sciences, let alone all of them.
I mention this to emphasize once again the importance of secrecy. Kershaw and I had a midnight conference, and I was hired under the most confidential terms.
Dan, listen—the news is absolutely stupendous. We’ve got a drive that’s so fast it’s like a dream. The stars are conquered. Almost as soon as I finish this letter, we leave for Centaurus.
I feel sick and shaky and cold and hot at the mere idea of it. It means everything. It’s going to blow the world wide open. Just think of all those people who were forcibly dumped on Mars and Venus and the various moons—it had to be done, of course; somebody had to live there and exploit their wealth—but now there’s hope, a new chance on greener, finer worlds.
From this point onward, man will expand without limit, and put an end forever to all those petty murderous squabbles over ownership of property. Henceforth, there will always be more than enough.
The reason we have to be so careful is that the Isher Empire will be shaken to its foundations by the unprecedented emigration that would begin immediately, and the Empress Innelda will be the first to realize, the first to attempt our destruction. We’re not even sure that the Weapon Shops will support such a change. After all, they are an integral part of the Isher set-up; they have provided the checks and balances, and so have helped to create the most stable governmental system ever devised for unst
able man. For the time being we prefer that they also do not find out what we have.
One more thing: Kershaw and I have discussed the possible effect of light years of distance on your and my sensory relation. He thinks that our speed of withdrawal from the solar system will give the effect of an abrupt break, and of course there will be the agony of acceleration. We—
Neelan stopped there. Because that was what he had felt, the agony, then the break! Gil wasn’t dead.
Or rather—his mind rushed on—Gil hadn’t died that day a year ago. Somewhere during the journey Greer had—
At that point, Hedrock once more tore his own consciousness clear of that integrated reaction. “My God,” he thought shakily, “we’re a part of each other. He’s having emotions based on my knowledge, and I’m experiencing the emotions as if they’re my own. It would be understandable if I was his brother, with whom he had long had an established sensory relationship. But I’m not. I’m a stranger, and we’ve only met once.”
His thought paused there. Because it was possible that to the alien scientists who were manipulating their two minds and bodies, there was no more difference between Neelan and himself than there had been between the Neelan twins. After all, most human nervous systems were structurally similar. If the two Neelans could be “attuned” to each other, then apparently so could any two human beings.
The Empire of Isher Page 28
