But that very day a change took place, although it seemed a minor one. The skies, hitherto a uniform blue, began to cloud over, although it still lacked some months of the rainy season. The King again consulted his scientists.
“Unseasonable rains,” his Chief Scientist told him, “are unusual, but not unprecedented.”
“It also grows colder,” the King said.
“We have noted that, and we recommend the issuing of cotton jackets to the troops.”
Later in the day, particles of white began to fall from the sky. The King was much alarmed by this.
“It is unusual,” the Chief Scientist said. “But not unprecedented. The last time this white substance fell, according to our records, was some seven hundred years ago. The stuff dissolves too fast for us to give it much more than a cursory examination. It seems to be fragments of clouds, torn apart by the high winds of the upper air.”
The army didn’t like it, of course. Armies don’t like unusual sights and unexpected omens. But they stuck it out, and took heart at the sight of the barbarians across the river, huddling around inadequate campfires in their drenched furs.
But it became colder still, and, as night came on, colder than men’s memories of how cold it could be. Double-woven cotton cloaks and mantles were issued to the troops. And still the cold increased. And once again the king consulted his scientists.
“It is true that we have never seen cold like this,” the Chief Scientist said. “But it makes no difference. It will bother the barbarians more than it will us. Have the men apply extra wax to their bowstrings, because one of the recorded properties of cold is to make flaxen bowstrings brittle.”
This was done, and the guard units along the riverbank were increased, and everyone passed a miserable night.
In the morning, the King was awakened by cries of alarm. Hurrying to the riverbank, the King beheld that the water had been transformed as though by an act of magic. No longer did the brown-gray waters move and lap. They had been changed overnight into a different substance. This substance was white in some spots, transparent in others. But strangest of all, it gave the appearance of being perfectly solid.
“My Gods!” cried the King. “Some demon has bewitched the river!”
“Not at all, Lord,” the Chief Scientist replied. “My assistants have been keeping close watch on the river all night, as befits followers of the scientific method. I can say with certainty that, in response to the unprecedented cold, the water has congealed—though that may not be quite the right term. In any event, the water has changed into a solid substance. We have long known the theoretical possibility of this—it is what we call transformation—but this is the first time we’ve had experimental corroboration.”
“Then it’s not witchcraft?” the King asked.
“Certainly not. We have just discovered a new natural law. Water, it seems, responds to extremes of cold by turning into a solid.”
The forces of the barbarians were moving onto the glittering white surface, cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence when they discovered it bore their weight. The King’s ships, frozen fast, stood in the river like isolated forts, easily bypassed. The barbarians flowed around them, a mighty horde of armed men. And the King, watching them cross the river in their myriads, and seeing his soldiers run, knew that all was lost.
Turning to his chief scientist, the King said, “You have deceived me! You said you could predict everything! And now look at what has happened!”
“My Lord,” the Chief Scientist said, “I regret this as much as you do. But you must not blame science for what has so unexpectedly taken place. There is a word in science, my Lord, to describe what has taken place here.”
“And what is that?”
“This sort of thing is generally referred to as an anomaly. An anomaly is something perfectly natural which could not have been predicted on the basis of what has gone before.”
“You never told me about anomalies,” the King said.
“Why should I burden you with the unknowable, O King, when so much of the knowable is available to us?”
By now the barbarians were drawing near. The King and his scientists turned to their horses in order to take flight.
“It is the end of the world,” the King said sadly, mounting.
“Not at all, sire,” the Chief Scientist said, also mounting. “It is a sad thing to lose a kingdom. But it may be of some comfort to you to know that you have reigned during the beginning of something new and unprecedented in the history of Atlantis.”
“And what is that?” asked the King.
“That white substance,” the scientist said, “we are now tentatively naming ‘ice.’ And unless I miss my guess, we have witnessed the beginning of Earth’s very first Ice Age.”
“Small comfort,” said the King, and galloped off in search of a new kingdom and better weather.
DIAL-A-DEATH
You never think it can happen, do you? You’re going along fine in the middle of your life. Time stretches endlessly ahead of you, and a serious matter such as dying will just have to wait because you haven’t time now even to consider it.
And then it happens. The glitch in the system. The little pain in your head becomes piercing. Whammo, cerebral hemorrhage. The car, out of control, mounts the curb and carries you screaming through the plate glass window. The guy behind you on the subway platform gives a nervous little twitch and a push and there you are, dancing on air under the thunderous headlight of the Broadway-7th Avenue Express. I don’t mean to be morbid, but these things happen. Then it’s too late to think of Dial-a-Death.
Jack Stanton made page 3 of the Times when a furniture sling parted and a grand piano landed on him from ten stories up. Jack didn’t have time to think about it, didn’t even know what happened. There was a sudden rush of air blowing straight down, and then whammo—a fast, clean death, and not unmusical.
You may have thought the transition between living and death would be instantaneous, but you’d be wrong. Latest research shows that once the body realizes that it’s outward bound on a one-way trip to whatever comes next, it goes into its own special time. A few seconds can elongate and stretch into the feeling of hours. That’s the time when you really need Dial-a-Death.
Jack Stanton never felt a thing. One minute he was walking down 57th Street in Manhattan thinking about how he could raise ten million dollars for a merger (he was a lawyer specializing in corporate finances) when there was something like a puff of air above his head and he found himself somewhere else.
He was standing on a landscaped lawn near a big gracious old house, like his parents used to have when he was a kid. A party was going on inside. He could hear the music, and through the windows he could see people dancing. Somebody waved to him from the house. A pretty redhaired girl was beckoning to him.
He went in. It looked like a really good party. There were a lot of people there and they all seemed to be having fun. They were square dancing inside. Jack hadn’t seen square dancing in twenty years. He joined in. Unexpectedly, he found that he was an expert at it. The crowd moved back to give him and his partner room. The girl he was dancing with was buxom and pretty and light on her feet. They were great together. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! They finished with a flourish and went hand in hand upstairs.
The girl led him into one of the back rooms. There were coats stacked two feet high on the big double bed. They got up on top of them. The girl was so astonishingly pretty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been cold, indifferent, or even blew a pink chewing gum bubble at the moment of supreme ecstasy. With her looks she couldn’t do anything wrong, not the first time, anyhow. And in fact she was amazingly responsive, tender, fiery, unfathomably and endlessly delicious. She was what you’d have to call a peak experience anyway you slice it.
Jack floated upward through the intensities of mounting excitement. His orgasm was tremendous, gargantuan, exemplary, incomparable, and he fell back on the bed exhausted,
sated, pleased beyond telling, dropping into that delicious time when exhaustion steals over you like a gift from Psyche and there is nothing ahead but a sweet floating fall through endless layers of soft-scented sleep.
Maybe he did sleep for a while. When he opened his eyes the girl was gone. The party was gone, even the house had vanished. Now he was standing alone in a long corridor, facing a closed door, and he was stark mother naked.
A voice came from nowhere: “Jack—go through the door.”
“Who is this?” Jack says. “Where am I?”
“Don’t ask questions. Just go through the door. Everything will be all right.”
Still drowsy and happy, Jack had an impulse to obey the voice. But he resisted. He had always been cantankerous, cross-grained, self-directed. He hadn’t gotten to where he was by taking orders from people. He was Jack Stanton. People did what he told them to do, not the other way around.
“Whoever you are,” Jack said, “quit kidding around and come out here and tell me what’s going on.”
“Mr. Stanton, please—”
“Who are you? What is all this?”
“I am Doctor Gustaffson from the Institute. Do you remember now?”
Jack nodded slowly. It was coming back to him. “The guy with the new medical thing. What was it?”
“Dial-a-Death. The Institute for Harmonious Dying.”
“I hired you?”
“That’s right.”
“To arrange my death?”
“To arrange your dying, Mr. Stanton, not your death. We had nothing to do with that grand piano falling on you. What a shame that was, cut off in your prime like that! On the part of myself and all the staff at Dial-a-Death I want to offer you our condolences. But we did all right by you, didn’t we? When the time came, Dial-a-Death was right there. Our operators picked up your neural web within milliseconds of the piano pulping you. The computer implants worked just right. The girl was something, eh? With programming like that it’s almost a pleasure to die, eh?”
“What are you talking about, dying? I’m in a hospital somewhere, right?”
“Mr. Stanton, be realistic. I hate to mention what must be a painful subject, but they could have put most of what they found of you in a gallon jar and still have room left for a wax seal. Face it, Mr. Stanton, the body’s gone, you’re dead.”
Jack Stanton had a moment of sickening panic. Death! He had tried to make it nice for himself. Sure, he’d signed up for Dial-a-Death, and it had cost plenty. A man owes it to himself to try to make his dying nice. But that was for some time in the future. Dying had always been for later.
“What you have to do now,” the doctor said, “is open that door in front of you and walk through.”
“And what happens then?”
“We don’t know. Nobody’s ever come back. Our job is to try to keep you in a good frame of mind until you reach the door. After that, you’re on your own.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jack said. “I’m staying right here.”
“Mr. Stanton, I’m very much afraid that won’t do.”
“I’m not going through that door!”
“Well, it’s up to you, Jack,” the doctor said. “This is the limit of Dial-a-Death’s service area.”
Jack Stanton stood alone in the corridor. To hell with them, he wasn’t going anywhere. He looked at the door. He was sort of curious to see what was on the other side. But that was probably what all dead people thought. They wanted to see what was on the other side of the door, and no one ever heard of them again.
To hell with that, Jack thought. I’m staying right here.
He waited. After a while the door opened all by itself. On the other side he could see another long corridor.
All right, now he knew what was on the other side. But he still didn’t move. They’d have to drag him through that door kicking and screaming.
It didn’t happen that way. The door waited for a while. When he still didn’t move it came for him. There was nothing to struggle against, nothing to resist. Suddenly he was on the other side. And then the next thing began.
WORMWORLD
Dear Robert,
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you and I have been able to establish telepathic contact across the vastness of space. I still can hardly believe that I am in communication with an alien creature. Not that it is entirely unexpected. Many of the intelligent worms of my world believe that other worlds exist with intelligent worms living in them. Most of us also admit the possibility (some say probability) that there are intelligent races out there that are not worms at all, not even vermiform, but really quite different. Many of us have been working toward telepathic contact with these hypothetical other-worlders.
From your description of yourself (which I didn’t completely understand) you seem to possess a high degree of bilateral symmetry. So do we. Some of our best theoreticians have long predicted Necessary Degrees of Symmetry as a precondition for intelligent life. I must question a rather astounding statement you made in your recent communication. You told me that you are a nonworm intelligent creature from another solid world who makes neither worm-hole nor nonwormhole, but instead moves around on the outside of your world, in contact with its surface!
At least, I think that’s what you were saying!
Now, the idea that you are a nonworm intelligence communicating to me from another world is easy enough for me to grasp. But that you live on the outer surface of your world, rather than inside, where one would normally expect even a nonworm alien intelligence to live . . .
Is that really where you live? On the surface?
Please clarify! It’s really important for me to get this straight, for reasons I’ll explain in my next communication. Just now I have to sign off rather hurriedly and do some urgent tunnel-redirecting. Hope to hear from you soon.
Good to hear from you again. If I understand you correctly, you assert that you are a solid, three-dimensional creature, like me, but living on the outside of your world. And you also assert (or rather, I infer from your statements) that you know not only the shape of your world, but also its volume, radius, surface dimensions, and so forth.
Frankly, that’s hard to believe.
Is that what you meant?
Are you really a creature from some distant planet, or another worm somewhere playing tricks on me?
Talking with you has given me difficulties. The other worms know I’m sending out a powerful vibration aimed and tightly focused out into space. A lot of worms do that. But I keep on tracking a single area (your world), and that leads other worms to ask if I’ve gotten obsessive or just what the hell I think I’m doing.
Making up believable tales about why I’ve locked my beam onto a single distant source is easier than telling worms that I’m in contact with a being who lives on the surface of a sphere.
But to hell with the difficulties. As far as I’m concerned this is fascinating stuff. It is extremely interesting to hear tales of wonder from different far-off places, and perhaps it doesn’t really matter if those places really exist, or maybe somehow, somewhere, somewhen, everything that can be imagined has to exist.
I have to sign off now. I promised Jill that I’d do parallel wormholes with her on a hexagonal grid that she thought up all by herself. Artistically speaking, I suppose it isn’t much, but it gives me great pleasure to do figures with her. We’ve made a lot of good parallel wormhole designs together in the last few hundred units, that gal and I.
Do you have mates in your world, Robert? Do you suffer the unending conflict between self-preservation and consummation?
Listen, Robert, philosophy interests me, as it seems to do you. You tell me that you discuss these matters just for the fun of it, not because you’re a professional at it. It’s the same with me. I’m an artist, and I don’t know what I’m talking about half of the time, and I’m glad that it’s the same for you, as you told me. I didn’t really want to contact some giant godlike intellect Out There;
I think I just wanted to find a friend, someone to tell the story of my life to, someone the story of whose life I want to hear.
What I’m trying to get at is this Robert, that I want to exchange knowledge with you, but I’m not an expert on anything except the art that I do. I gather it’s the same for you. Then good for us! Professional worm philosophers and scientists usually assume that one of them is going to make contact with their intellectual counterpart when contact is finally established between inhabitants of different worlds. Isn’t it nice that it’s happened to a couple of experimental pattern-makers like us?
Robert, are you a funny looking creature living in accord with weird and special laws of nature? Or am I? Or are we both?
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hi. It’s me again.
Well, I made an attempt at communicating with one of my fellow-worms about you not long ago. I didn’t figure I’d have much luck at it (and how right I was!) but I had to try. Maybe it was silly of me, but I must tell you that worms are very preoccupied with that sort of thing, perhaps because of the physically isolated lives we lead.
On the other hand, worms, despite their passion for science and metaphysics, and their pressing need for the findings of both, tend to be skeptical about anything they haven’t thought up themselves or actually experienced, except for the lunatic fringe that will believe anything.
I didn’t want to start a cult on the one hand, or get laughed at on the other, or be put down for crazy on the third hand, or considered possessed by an evil worm-spirit on the fourth hand. (Exactly how many hands do you have, Robert? I figure four, one for each of your locomotive extensions from your central body mass. Have I guessed right? Worms have no hands, but the concept of handedness is part of our ancient lore.)
I decided to make a trail run in the form of a hypothesis. It just so happened a few units ago that I chanced to be running a pattern contiguous to the pattern of my friend, Klaus. Klaus and I have shared numerous pattern-contiguities, more so in the old days than now. Back then we had great resonance and once even paralleled the same figure (a dodecahedron, if memory serves) for seven linked variations until—frankly—I got bored and decided that I had to go faster and more elegantly, and left Klaus behind and went on to pursue my career in art. Klaus took to paralleling the philosophical wormhole patterns and has made a fair reputation for himself.
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