Meeting at Infinity

by John Brunner

  Nevada was too dizzy from the mental blow which had followed his wasting of a valuable charge on a mere animal, or panic would certainly have made him shoot the wild man down. But neither he nor Curdy—looking half-backward over his shoulder because Nevada was facing the pigs at the moment, and he had not revolved the fire post’s turntable base—had time to react before the boar had lowered his head with its tusks like battering-rams and hurled himself screaming forwards.

  The edge of the armored mushroom came to two feet from the ground; then there was a gap, then a low parapet on which the occupants would rest their guns to sight them for long distance shots. The parapet was only of native wood. The boar’s impetus smashed it down; the huge hoofed body slammed against Nevada’s head, jerked it back, snapped his neck like a dry stick, hammered Curdy Wence flat with concussion and two broken ribs—and was gone like a tornado.

  19

  THEIR FACES already reflected their weariness, and it was only the beginning. With every additional fact, it looked more as though it was going to go on for a long time. They would have to start drugging themselves awake shortly.

  The realization flashed briefly over Clostrides’s mind as he heard Sergeant Carr out. Knard was listening; so was Jockey Hole. The sergeant was a simple policeman and hardly understood the significance of what he was saying, but he had memorized his message well, and it made sense to his listeners.

  “She said to tell you that the perceptor is an analogue not just of one reality, but of all realities. It doesn’t depend on matter, so its fine discrimination depends only on the practice you have in using it. After a long time you get to control it—first you influence people to set events in train that you desire, and in the end you can impose yourself on it so strongly that you can sort of create yourself in another Tacket world. She said she’d done it. She said she had been to Lanchery’s franchise and told him to disobey your orders.”

  “What?” Clostrides jerked forward.

  Carr gave a dogged nod. “She said to explain to you that she suggested the idea to Lanchery in the first place. She said the idea is that the people from Akkilmar will be looking for an invasion of soldiers with modern armor and energy guns. What they’ll get will be animals they can’t control, and savages with spears that the defenders will take at first for local natives out hunting. She said to say it’s bound to work.”

  “But—” Clostrides began. Knard raised his hand.

  “I’m beginning to understand a lot of things,” he said. “What has happened here is that Allyn has been driven by her desire to revenge herself on her husband to explore far more of the potentialities of the rho function field than anyone else has outside Akkilmar.”

  “That’s about what she said,” Carr confirmed. “And she said that any perceptor reflects all other perceptors, too—that’s why the people out there gave the perceptor to us, just to have some in our world. That was all they needed to know what was going on here. Seems it’s easier, she told me, than doing it without—though that’s possible.”

  “But if they can come and go between the Tacket worlds as they like, they could just invade us and wipe us off the map.” Clostrides had to wipe sweat from his face.

  “They don’t think in terms of invading us and wiping us out. They’ve schemed this attack on Lyken to get a large number of us under their mental control. They work like that, always at a distance, manipulating people and sort of inching them into the right actions to give what’s wanted as a result.”

  Clostrides folded his hands tightly together, making him hurt himself. He thought of being a puppet, moved as though by strings from a distance. He found the idea loathsome.

  “She said, too,” Carr went on, “that they felt superior to us because we haven’t their mental disciplines, because we have to use portals to get from one Tacket world to another, and all like that. She said they knew she was taking a hand, right from way back—and they even told her they knew, sort of. Or let her guess it. But they thought so little of us—I mean, like they’d already given us the perceptor and been sure we couldn’t use it properly—they were sort of patronizing, and treated her like a kid playing a game for grownups. It wasn’t till they got wind of her having been to Lanchery’s franchise and interfering there in some way they didn’t know about that they got to taking her seriously.”

  “Was that all?” prompted Clostrides.

  “Just about. Except that she said she didn’t care about getting back at her husband any more, and maybe it was an accident that burned her, not a try at murder. She said it was because her beauty was all burned off.”

  Knard breathed a gusty sigh of relief. Clostrides shot a keen glance at him.

  He said, “Well, one thing is clear. We’ve got to start taking Allyn Vage seriously, if she’s really so skilled with the perceptor now.”

  “Was she all right when you left her?” Knard demanded of Carr, who shrugged and nodded.

  “I guess so. I left a guard in case one of these characters who spring from nowhere turned up again. And she showed me what to do to her—her gadgets, the medical things she’s all done up in.”

  “She what?” said Knard, in a chill voice like a sudden death knell.

  Carr looked bewildered. “Like I said. She explained I had to turn a stopcock and pull a couple of switches—said it was to wake her up properly because she was kind of low at night—”

  Knard stood up with his face white as paper, his hands suddenly clenching, and took half a step forward. He barked at Carr, “Don’t you realize what you’ve done, you fool? If you turned a cock and pulled two switches, you turned off her nutriment supply—her blood-flow, her heart!—and you turned off her perceptor!”

  Carr’s mouth worked. He shrank back from the threatening glare of the doctor, and tried to speak. Only the rushing sound of exhaled breath gave form to his words. He said, “But she told me to do it …”

  “Does that mean that—?” began Clostrides, and could not finish. Knard moved slowly back to his chair and sat down again, like a zombie, without conscious intention.

  “Allyn Vage, then,” he said, “is dead. Any more ideas?”

  Into the pause which followed broke a call on the communicator. His face lowering, Clostrides answered it, and the harassed aide whom he had earlier instructed to assemble the weapons and transport for two thousand appeared on the screen.

  “We got our forces down to Yorell’s Southern-K Portal, Bailiff,” he said in a lifeless voice. “Personnel in charge there refuse to let them through without Yorell’s personal authority. Yorell sent back a reply to our requisition which I don’t think I ought to repeat. What do I do now?”

  Clostrides frowned with the effort of having to shift his attention. That was new to him. He could never remember having felt like this before. Nor did he usually have to look about him—look at people who were not even his comparative equals, the Directors of The Market—for guidance in a decision. He thought suddenly he was getting old.

  “Do we go ahead, in view of what we know now?” he said. It cost him a great deal to ask that question.

  Jockey stirred in his seat. He said, “If I’ve untied the string right, Bailiff, we’re scared that maybe people involved have been sort of prodded into doing what the numbers at Akkilmar want. Gold?”

  Clostrides gave a heavy nod.

  “This I tell you, Bailiff,” Jockey went on. “Whoever got prodded, it wasn’t my boys or me. We’re down the bottom of the pile. We’re the dregs of society. We’re the half that lives on a pension and what we can graft off the pleasure pads and the rest of all that. If these numbers at Akkilmar feel all superior to you and Lyken and whoever else, they won’t notice the yonder boys at all. You use my boys, Bailiff. Get me a line to Gaffles at this place of Yorell’s where they’re being sticky. Let me tell him how to make it free falling all the way, gold?”

  Why he did what he did next, Clostrides did not know until it was over. He got out of his chair. He stepped aside from it, and indica
ted to Jockey Hole that he was to take his place. There was a long silence. The aide stared out of the screen, bewildered, waiting for orders.

  “Gold!” said Jockey at last, and moved to the chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though feeling the aura of power which came from it, then snapped them open again and barked at the man in the screen.

  Neither Gaffles, who was in command as far as it was possible to command this wild force, nor any member of the two thousand-strong gang of yonder boys that swarmed into Yorell’s southern import center knew very much about what they were doing or why. They knew they were doing something, and it seemed to be something important. That meant a lot to them. Down on the bottom of the pile where they came from, there wasn’t anything important to do, except what they made important for themselves. They could run for Jockey Hole, the biggest frog in their little puddle. That was as close to real importance as they could get.

  Jockey knew that. He’d been where they still were; he knew better than they did that he had never got very far away from there. He had told Gaffles that because of this the two thousand would not be a simple rabble—they might not take strict orders or accept much discipline, but they would act in concert and they would get things done the way they thought best. His final order was as straightforward as the rest.

  “Turn ’em on and let ’em run!”

  They had never handled anything more deadly than a whangee stick or a knife, most of them. Now they had gas guns and some energy guns. One bolt was fired, and that was for a purpose, in the storming of the high blue citadel which housed Yorell’s Southern-K Portal. Two hundred out of the two thousand set to work preventing interference while a group of amazed and worried technicians, who had come down from The Market with instruments calibrated to locate Lyken’s franchise, zeroed in the portal on the right world among thousands.

  There were qualms when the yonder boys saw the soap-like film stretch before them, leading into the alien world; city-nurtured, all of them, they distrusted the country before them. They paused, crowding the great hall into which Yorell brought the trade goods from his franchise by the hundred bales or the hundred tons at a time, and wondered again about what they were doing.

  Across the hall, Gaffles caught the eye of Tad, who had helped him capture Erlking in the fight at the Pleasuredrome. He curled his lip with a hint of a sneer, as though to imply, “Yellow!”

  Tad went through, and the rest went after him, in a stream a half-mile long.

  They tramped two miles, and there the determination almost had time to leak away. Somehow it lasted out. And they came to Akkilmar, a town of wooden buildings with grass between them as smooth as well-kept lawn, close to the sea. On a rise overlooking it, there were woods, among which Gaffles mustered his forces and enjoined them to utter silence. It seemed that the woods breathed, but that was all.

  Cautiously, accompanied by the technicians who had made their arrival at Akkilmar possible, he crept forward to the very edge of the woods, and from a hiding place behind a thick clump of bushes studied the town with binoculars.

  There were some people visible, moving about among the houses, who wore little more than metal ornaments and seemed as primitive as any aboriginals on any known Tacket world. But these were few. Far outnumbering them, men and women, wearing elaborate harnesses of dull gray over drab costumes so bulky that Gaffles guessed instantly they must be armored, gathered in the grassy lanes. Around them, these people had weapons girded. Some of them were attending to huge ovoidal devices of shiny wire which they set spinning on blocky cubical pedestals. Others were assembling loads of square black boxes on platforms which hummed above the ground and could be moved from place to place by operators walking behind and touching them lightly to steer them.

  Beside Gaffles, the technician who was nearest drew in a sharp breath. He said, “Those are no savages!”

  Gaffles shook his head. “They’re the enemy,” he said. “I think—”

  Abruptly one of the platforms loaded with black boxes rose from the ground at a steep angle and began to soar towards the north. There was the spitting hiss, from somewhere along the edge of the wood, of an energy gun, and the bolt it launched struck the flying platform squarely, like a clay pigeon, and melted it into a fiery ball.

  Gaffles checked what he had been going to say. He cursed under his breath, and regretted it. There was nothing to be done now except one thing. He threw back his head and gave a tremendous yell.

  He shouted, “Fire!”

  20

  IN THAT PART of his mind which had not been too badly battered by the repeated mental hammering of the men from Akkilmar, Shane Malco was tempted to say aloud “I told you so.”

  But Lyken’s haggard, pitiable face prevented him. And after all, with the powers these strangers possessed, who could resist? Visions tormented him of worse than puppet armies: of millions “black-boxed” into unquestioning submission. No one who gave much thought to it could find his own world’s middleman society attractive, with its substructure of dregs and its superstructure of vicious rivalries. But in comparison, it was paradise.

  He licked his lips and looked about the operations room. The staff present seemed more like wax dummies than men who breathed—even down to the man from Akkilmar who sat at the side of the room with his black box on his knee, waiting.

  There was a risk of more mental punishment if he even spoke, he knew. But there had been silence for perhaps an hour now, and anything was preferable to the isolation of silence.

  Licking dry lips, he said, “Ahmed, what do you suppose has happened? Do you suppose the attacks have started?”

  Lyken gave a weary shrug, and made no answer.

  The silence closed in again like fog. More minutes dragged by. Then one of the room’s doors slid aside, and a man entered with the now familiar expression of one who had been “black-boxed”—bitter, resentful, but hopeless. Malco shifted in his chair to look at him; even Lyken looked up.

  The newcomer crossed the floor and stood before the man from Akkilmar. He said in a dull voice, “There has been a message.”

  The man from Akkilmar nodded. His face was expectant but not at all eager.

  “The wild men and animals have destroyed all the fire posts except three on the southern side,” the messenger said, and a spark of enthusiasm enlivened his dull voice for a moment. “The supplies and reinforcements from Akkilmar have not come. It is believed that Akkilmar has been destroyed.”

  The impassivity of the man from Akkilmar vanished in an instant. He got to his feet slowly, his mouth working. After a moment, he spoke hissingly.

  “You lie!”

  “I can’t lie,” said the messenger, and gave the words a weight of somber satisfaction. “I’ve been treated with one of your black boxes.”

  The man from Akkilmar made as though to raise the box he himself carried and smash open the messenger’s skull, savagely. Slowly the meaning of what had been said penetrated Malco’s mind, and also Lyken’s. They exchanged wondering glances, hardly yet daring to hope.

  “What else?” said the man from Akkilmar, his teeth together, his hands closing into fists.

  “That—” the messenger began, and was interrupted by the shrill clanging of alarms. The technicians around the room, startled into life, began to move, scanning their Tacket detectors. They too had been shocked from their lethargy by the news; now, as they saw what information the detectors had to yield, they dared to smile.

  The man from Akkilmar tapped his black box, and one of the technicians gave a sudden groan.

  “What happens?” came the barking question. The technician had to put out one hand and find support, but his sweating face revealed the triumph that he felt.

  “The attack has finally started,” he said grimly. “There are portals opening all around the base, and it looks as though mass by the thousands of tons is being shifted in.”

  Another door opened, and a woman in the costume of Akkilmar came panting in. She rapped out some
thing to her companion in her own language, and he hesitated for a moment. When he answered, although his words were incomprehensible, it was plain that he was spewing angry oaths. He closed both hands on his black box.

  A rush of pain like boiling water swamped Malco’s mind, Lyken’s, the minds of the technicians, and hurled them into unconsciousness. The last thought that Malco carried with him was a notion, too sharp to be an illusion, that the man and the woman from Akkilmar had vanished from where they stood.

  “We can’t stop it now,” said Clostrides, and his voice was doom-laden. “Once the other Directors found out that Lanchery had gone into the franchise as planned, and once they knew that we’d put a force through Yorell’s portal near Akkilmar, no amount of arguing or pleading or anything could have held them back. So the men of Akkilmar get their victims anyway.”

  From across the room, in the chair to which he had returned, Jockey Hole looked at the high bailiff curiously. He said, “Bailiff, you still got your string knotted?”

  Clostrides gave him an uncomprehending glance.

  Jockey shrugged. “I read this different,” he said. “Why worry any more? Lanchery got in his attack, the idea being that these numbers couldn’t control animals and anyway they wouldn’t start worrying about them till too late. We got in our attack at Akkilmar, and like I said these numbers wouldn’t have paid any attention to dregs like my boys, gold? I’ll lay on one thing—the way it finally was set up, it’s going to be free falling now all the way.”

  “If the attack on Akkilmar served any purpose,” Clostrides said heavily, “and if the defenses were wiped out by Lanchery and his wild beast show …”