by Jerry
High above him canvas bags stretched across the top of the hall to keep rain and snow and wind out. Centuries ago, before the Machines had gone, the roof was made of stone and metal, and the great hall was white with the glare, not of crude torches, but of bulbs of pure light. But that was long ago.
Varl walked to a wooden platform near the back of the hall. From here he could see the shrouded figures of the Masters as they gazed down upon him. He waited. “Then it is true?” a voice boomed. “Yes,” answered Varl, “it is true.”
“And the Machine works?”
“It does.”
“What does it do?”
Varl paused. “That,” he said, “I do not know.”
The speaker stood up and Varl looked at the great black cloak that almost covered him.
“Years ago,” boomed the Master, “we destroyed the Machines because they sought to destroy us. Now one Kilant has found and rebuilt a metal monster, and he chooses to bring back the slavery which our fathers died to wipe away.”
“No!” protested Varl. “No, Masters. It is not slavery he seeks, but knowledge. The Machine is only a search for light, not a means of endangering the city.” There was silence. Then another of the Masters spoke. “You are a good soldier, Varl, but unversed in the ways of the law. And that is as it should be. But pity for enemies of the state is a weakness not to be tolerated. Guard against it, Varl.” Raising his hand in a salute to the darkness above them, the Master gave the verdict.
“We, the Masters, decree that all who search for a light to destroy the power and glory of darkness must themselves be destroyed. We have broken the power of the Machines once. They shall not rise again.” He turned and spoke to the waiting soldier. “Destroy Kilant’s work. If he protests, or seeks to impede your duty, then execute him. Otherwise, there is no need to do him harm.”
Varl bowed. “Yes, Master.”
The Master said nothing and Varl waited. “Is that all?” he asked.
“That is all. We have spoken.”
The assembled Masters saluted as a sign of their common assent.
Bowing till his forehead touched the ground, Varl walked backward and left the House of the Masters. Hiding in the shadows of the smaller streets, he hurried to the outskirts of the city, thence to the home of Kilant. Time was short.
THE SMALL, grey shack was silent in the moonlight. Varl walked among the shadows till he reached the broken door. Looking about him, he slowly lifted the latch and walked in.
Feeling carefully in the semi-darkness, Varl could see the reflected moonlight on the crystal stand in the center of the machine.
“Kilant,” he whispered. “Kilant!” The scientist, clad hastily in skins, opened a side door. “Who’s there?”
“I, Varl.”
“Welcome, my friend. But what brings you here?”
There was a rustle in the darkness and Varl turned, drawing his sword. It was Mila.
“There is danger,” she said. “I knew it! I knew it!”
Varl nodded. “Yes, there is danger. The Machine is to be broken—and you with it, if you resist. The Masters so ordered me just now.”
Kilant spoke bitterly. “I offer them the answer to time and space and dimension and the fools stop me. I hold the world in my hands and they would murder me!”
“There is no time to lose. The Masters have not ordered your death, but the crowd would kill you anyway, and none would stop them. You must escape, Kilant. I will help you.”
“Escape? And leave the Machine behind to be destroyed?”
“Escape! Yes! Yes!” whispered Mila. “We will escape in the Machine itself.”
“No,” stated Kilant. “No. The risk is too great; I am not yet ready.”
“Whatever you do,” said Varl, “must be done quickly. Your lives are forfeit in the city.”
“What is life,” asked Mila, “but the rays of our minds that come from the brain which initially begins them? When the body is part of an added dimension—those rays of thought will live and shoot out into the farthest parts of the universe. We will live, Kilant. In that Machine!”
“Will you dare try it?” asked Varl. Kilant clasped Mila in his arms.
“We can try,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” said the soldier. “Good-by, Varl.” Kilant walked over to the control board and pulled the switch. Slowly the Machine pulsed into life. Arm in arm, Kilant and Mila strode up to the crystal stand and there they waited as the glow from the crystals began to diffuse over them.
The long grey and silvery bar over them began to glow and crackle with flame. Between the bar and the crystal stand the air became violet and pale yellow, shining brightly, then bursting into a loud roar. Varl watched the flames subside as Mila and Kilant faded away, only their outlines remaining. Then there was nothing.
The soldier picked up a long iron bar and walked toward the machine. He waited as the glowing of the crystal stand became lighter, dying away, and thought of the blackness beyond the stars. The empty-space in the far-off heavens were now one with Kilant and Mila—two wandering meteors in the skies.
Lifting up the iron bar, he smashed it down upon the crystal stand, and upon the delicate wiring and glass tubing. Lifting it up again he rained blow after blow upon the apparatus until the room was a mass of shattered bits of metal.
The Machine was destroyed. Varl felt old and tired.
STEPHEN looked up from his supper and spoke to the professor. “It is possible that, in some precreation universe, on some forgotten galaxy, a people, or beings, lived so deeply within the secrets of infinity that they became a part of it.”
Professor Ladinas smiled. “The conception that cosmic rays originate from some brain or disembodied intelligence, and that they are merely the thought-waves of such intelligence—well, it simply won’t gain much credence in scientific circles.”
“Of course,” Stephen answered. “I know that. But still the feeling persists that some voice from another dimension, from a universe that is now gone, is trying to speak to us, to break the veil between us. The thought runs over and over in my mind whenever I listen to the audio-transformer.”
He looked across the room to the laboratory where they kept the research apparatus. Click-click, went the machine, click-click, click-click, click-click; and Stephen kept thinking that somewhere, someone was trying to say something.
PROOF
Hal Clement
It’s a little hard for us to realize, but the fact is that the condition we know as “solid” matter is a freak, an abnormality that, practically speaking, doesn’t exist in the universe . . .
Kron held his huge freighter motionless, feeling forward for outside contact. The tremendous interplay of magnetic and electrostatic fields just beyond the city’s edge was as clearly perceptible to his senses as the city itself—a mile-wide disk ringed with conical field towers, stretching away behind and to each side. The ship was poised between two of the towers; immediately behind it was the field from which Kron had just taken off. The area was covered with cradles of various forms—cup-shaped receptacles which held city craft like Kron’s own; long, boat-shaped hollows wherein reposed the cigarlike vessels which plied between the cities; and towering skeleton frameworks which held upright the slender double cones that hurtled across the dark, lifeless regions between stars.
Beyond the landing field was the city proper; the surface of the disk was covered with geometrically shaped buildings—cones, cylinders, prisms, and hemispheres, jumbled together.
Kron could “see” all this as easily as a human being in an airplane can see New York; but no human eyes could have perceived this city, even if a man could have existed anywhere near it. The city, buildings and all, glowed a savage, white heat; and about and beyond it—a part of it, to human eyes—raged the equally dazzling, incandescent gases of the solar photosphere.
The freighter was preparing to launch itself into that fiery ocean; Kron was watching the play of the artificial reaction fields that suppor
ted the city, preparatory to plunging through them at a safe moment.
There was considerable risk of being flattened against the edge of the disk if an inauspicious choice was made, but Kron was an experienced flier, and slipped past the barrier with a sudden, hurtling acceleration that would have pulped any body of flesh and bone. The outer fringe of the field flung the globe sharply downward; then it was free, and the city was dwindling above them.
Kron and four others remained at their posts; the rest of the crew of thirty relaxed, their spherical bodies lying passive in the cuplike rests distributed through the ship, bathing in the fierce radiance on which those bodies fed, and which was continually streaming from a three-inch spheroid at the center of the craft. That an artificial source of energy should be needed in such an environment may seem strange, but to these creatures the outer layers of the Sun were far more inhospitable to life than is the stratosphere of Earth to human beings.
They had evolved far down near the solar core, where pressures and temperatures were such that matter existed in the “collapsed” state characteristic of the entire mass of white dwarf stars. Their bodies were simply constructed: a matrix of close-packed electrons—really an unimaginably dense electrostatic field, possessing quasi-solid properties—surrounded a core of neutrons, compacted to the ultimate degree. Radiation of sufficient energy, falling on the “skin,” was stabilized, altered to the pattern and structure of neutrons; the tiny particles of neutronium which resulted were borne along a circulatory system—of magnetic fields, instead of blood—to the nucleus, where it was stored.
The race had evolved to the point where no material appendages were needed. Projected beams and fields of force were their limbs, powered by the annihilation of some of their own neutron substance. Their strange senses gave them awareness not only of electromagnetic radiation, permitting them to “see” in a more or less normal fashion, but also of energies still undreamed of by human scientists. Kron, hundreds of miles below the city now, was still dimly aware of its location, though radio waves, light and gamma rays were all hopelessly fogged in the clouds of free electrons. At his goal, far down in the solar interior, “seeing” conditions would be worse—anything more than a few hundred yards distant would be quite indetectable even to him.
Poised beside Kron, near the center of the spheroidal sunship, was another being. Its body was ovoid in shape, like that of the Solarian, but longer and narrower, while the ends were tipped with pyramidal structures of neutronium, which projected through the “skin.” A second, fainter static aura enveloped the creature outside the principal surface; and as the crew relaxed in their cups, a beam of energy from this envelope impinged on Kron’s body. It carried a meaning, transmitting a clear thought from one being to the other.
“I still find difficulty in believing my senses,” stated the stranger. “My own worlds revolve about another which is somewhat similar to this; but such a vast and tenuous atmosphere is most unlike conditions at home. Have you ever been away from Sol?”
“Yes,” replied Kron, “I was once on the crew of an interstellar projectile. I have never seen your star, however; my acquaintance with it is entirely through hearsay. I am told it consists almost entirely of collapsed matter, like the core of our own; but there is practically no atmosphere. Can this be so? I should think, at the temperature necessary for life, gases would break free of the core and form an envelope.”
“They tend to do so, of course,” returned the other, “but our surface gravity is immeasurably greater than anything you have here; even your core pull is less, since it is much less dense than our star. Only the fact that our worlds are small, thus causing a rapid diminution of gravity as one leaves them, makes it possible to get a ship away from them at all; atoms, with only their original velocities, remain within a few miles of the surface.
“But you remind me of my purpose on this world—to check certain points of a new theory concerning the possible behavior of aggregations of normal atoms. That was why I arranged a trip on your flier; I have to make density, pressure, temperature, and a dozen other kinds of measurements at a couple of thousand different levels, in your atmosphere. While I’m doing it, would you mind telling me why you make these regular trips—and why, for that matter, you live so far above your natural level? I should think you would find life easier below, since there would be no need to remain in sealed buildings, or to expend such a terrific amount of power in supporting your cities.”
Kron’s answer was slow.
“We make the journeys to obtain neutronium. It is impossible to convert enough power from the immediate neighborhood of the cities to support them; we must descend periodically for more, even though our converters take so much as to lower the solar temperature considerably for thousands of miles around each city.
“The trips are dangerous—you should have been told that. We carry a crew of thirty, when two would be enough to man this ship, for we must fight, as well as fly. You spoke truly when you said that the lower regions of Sol are our natural home; but for aeons we have not dared to make more than fleeting visits, to steal the power which is life to us.
“Your little worlds have been almost completely subjugated by your people, Sirian; they never had life forms sufficiently powerful to threaten seriously your domination. But Sol, whose core alone is far larger than the Sirius B pair, did develop such creatures. Some are vast, stupid, slow-moving, or immobile; others are semi-intelligent and rapid movers; all are more than willing to ingest the ready-compacted neutronium of another living being.”
Kron’s tale was interrupted for a moment, as the Sirian sent a ray probing out through the ship’s wall, testing the physical state of the inferno beyond. A record was made, and the Solarian resumed.
“We, according to logical theory, were once just such a race—of small intelligence, seeking the needs of life among a horde of competing organisms. Our greatest enemy was a being much like ourselves in size and power—just slightly superior in both ways. We were somewhat ahead in intelligence, and I suppose we owe them some thanks—without the competition they provided, we should not have been forced to develop our minds to their present level. We learned to cooperate in fighting them, and from that came the discovery that many of us together could handle natural forces that a single individual could not even approach, and survive. The creation of force effects that had no counterpart in nature was the next step; and, with the understanding of them, our science grew.
“The first cities were of neutronium, like those of today, but it was necessary to stabilize the neutrons with fields of energy; at core temperature, as you know, neutronium is a gas. The cities were spherical and much smaller than our present ones. For a long time, we managed to defend them.
“But our enemies evolved, too; not in intelligence, but in power and fecundity. With overspecialization of their physical powers, their mentalities actually degenerated; they became little more than highly organized machines, driven, by an age-old enmity toward our race, to seek us out and destroy us. Their new powers at last enabled them to neutralize, by brute force, the fields which held our cities in shape; and then it was that, from necessity, we fled to the wild, inhospitable upper regions of Sol’s atmosphere. Many cities were destroyed by the enemy before a means of supporting them was devised; many more fell victims to forces which we generated, without being able to control, in the effort. The dangers of our present-day trips seem trivial beside those our ancestors braved, in spite of the fact that ships not infrequently fail to return from their flights. Does that answer your question?”
The Sirian’s reply was hesitant. “I guess it does. You of Sol must have developed far more rapidly than we, under that drive; your science, I know, is superior to ours in certain ways, although it was my race which first developed space flight.”
“You had greater opportunities in that line,” returned Kron. “Two small stars, less than a diameter apart, circling a larger one at a distance incomparably smaller than the usual inters
tellar interval, provided perfect ground for experimental flights; between your world and mine, even radiation requires some one hundred and thirty rotations to make the journey, and even the nearest other star is almost half as far.
“But enough of this—history is considered by too many to be a dry subject. What brings you on a trip with a power flier? You certainly have not learned anything yet which you could not have been told in the city.”
During the conversation, the Sirian had periodically tested the atmosphere beyond the hull. He spoke, rather absently, as though concentrating on something other than his words.
“I would not be too sure of that, Solarian. My measurements are of greater delicacy than we have ever before achieved. I am looking for a very special effect, to substantiate or disprove an hypothesis which I have recently advanced—much to the detriment of my prestige. If you are interested, I might explain: laugh afterward if you care to—you will not be the first.
“The theory is simplicity itself. It has occurred to me that matter—ordinary substances like iron and calcium—might actually take on solid form, like neutronium, under the proper conditions. The normal gas, you know, consists of minute particles traveling with considerable speed in all directions. There seems to be no way of telling whether or not these atoms exert appreciable forces on each other; but it seems to me that if they were brought closely enough together, or slowed down sufficiently, some such effects might be detected.”
“How, and why?” asked Kron. “If the forces are there, why should they not be detectable under ordinary conditions?”
“Tiny changes in velocity due to mutual attraction or repulsion would scarcely be noticed when the atomic speeds are of the order of hundreds of kilometers per second,” returned the Sirian. “The effects I seek to detect are of a different nature. Consider, please. We know the sizes of the various atoms, from their radiations. We also know that, under normal conditions, a given mass of any particular gas fills a certain volume. If, however, we surround this gas with an impenetrable container and exert pressure, that volume decreases. We would expect that decrease to be proportional to the pressure, except for an easily determined constant due to the size of the atoms, if no interatomic forces existed; to detect such forces, I am making a complete series of pressure-density tests, more delicate than any heretofore, from the level of your cities down to the neutron core of your world.