A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  ‘Two?” asked Sita, raising her eyebrows.

  Bergier nodded. “The first was a young Percept on his first cruise. They discovered the anomaly, reported it to Vega IV and started the standard probe approach prior to charting. When they didn’t report back within three days Pavel was sent. He also took a standard approach, sending back a running account. At five hundred kilometers, the transmission cut off.”

  “Perhaps he entered the hole and came out between two galactic systems,” Sita said.

  Bergier shook his head. “They would have said they were going in first, which they didn’t.”

  “Five hundred kilometers you said, Jack?”

  “Right. I doublechecked with Vega.”

  “What’s the hole’s diameter?”

  “A little more than that.”

  ‘There’s never been a hole bigger than ten kilometers,” Fleming said.

  “We’ve charted thousands, but this one is huge,” Bergier said.

  “Why did we get called?” asked Sita.

  “Fleming is the closest experienced Percept.”

  “Well, as his physician, I’d better get him in shape,” she said.

  Fleming watched her as she looked at his shaved head and began to remove the needles.

  “Take a rest, Sita—use some of your back leave. You don’t have to go.”

  “If you went to hell, Fleming,” she said, “I’d have to go too. You’re a piece of equipment that has to be in top shape.”

  “Put him to sleep, Sita,” Bergier said. “He’s got a lot of work ahead of him.”

  Two observer starships were waiting for the Robert B. Leighton when she arrived at Epsilon Lyrae.

  “Just look at them.” Fleming’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “We’re the guinea pigs and they’re going to watch.” He turned to Captain Bergier. “When do we start?”

  “Swift will send a drone probe in first.”

  Fleming nodded. “Let me know when—I’ll follow it as it goes in.”

  Later Fleming’s eyes were covered with sensing pads and earplugs played a sibilant wash of white noise into his mind through the microelectrodes which had again been inserted into the scar tissue pockets in his skull.

  Nearby, Sita Rahman sat at the med console monitoring his body functions and the precisely measured micro-flow of hallucinogens into his blood stream.

  The ship’s computer waited in programmed patience until Sita connected Fleming’s mind, then it began a stream of tests.

  A series of differential equations flashed across Fleming’s closed field of vision. He stored them in the computer’s work memory banks and activated the proper solution subroutines, which took the data and computed the answers. At a critical juncture the computer queried Fleming for the proper path to follow. Fleming activated the Runge-Kutta approximation in thirty-three steps. The computer compared Fleming’s methods and delay times to the preferred answers in its banks and continued the tests.

  Fleming ran problems in human psychology and motivation, radar sensing distortions and vectors, and other simulated situations. A minute after Sita connected Fleming with the computer it had compared his answers and methods with the desired results and weighed his failures and successes. Then it projected a series of Hinton hypercubes onto Fleming’s field of vision.

  The multi-colored cubes rotated slowly, revealing lines of distortion and plane surfaces covered with light. Fleming concentrated on them, traced the edges to a right-angled juncture and followed the fourth perpendicular into four-space.

  The computer was warming him up deftly.

  Suddenly it opened its circuits fully and the Robert B. Leighton became Fleming Mayhew’s body. His eyes detected radar impulses, his ears the sighing of the stellar winds; his voice was a laser beam flickering out to the nearby observational starships.

  And the full range of his sensors from far below the infrared to beyond the ultraviolet showed him the splendor of the star which had collapsed upon itself, punching a hole into the fabric of space, letting matter stream through into another part of the universe, leaving only a black cave.

  He was still too distant to see the hole itself in all four dimensions, but he sensed the stream of matter being drawn in, coalescing into a whirlpool, radiating at frequencies beyond the range of his human self, fed to him by the computer and visualized by him as a fountain of rainbow colors.

  Fleming inhaled the spectacle, lingering over each of the streamers: hydrogen, radiating at the twenty-one centimeter band, a rich royal purple; helium, a vivid spring green; a sudden mass of oxygen atoms, scarce, swirling in a small nebula of crimson then sucked into the gaping cavity in the fabric of space, to appear megaparsecs away. The picture was unchanging, yet always different.

  Inside his human self, in the soft creature contained by the starship, he could barely sense the beings who cared for him: dependable Jack Bergier, with a hangover of care nibbling at the back of his mind; Sita Rahman, watching her dials and meters intently, ready to bring him out if the machine-man linkage should anything go wrong.

  There was another presence, beyond his starship size body, and Fleming reached out a tendril of thought to probe it. It was another Percept, a cadet, observing from the Ernest Swift, a bright red thread of fear running through his mind. Fleming revealed his own thoughts to him, showing his own fears and the controls by which he harnessed them.

  Is Professor Weisberg still at the Academy?

  The stars twinkled with laughter. Yes. Last week he slipped salt into the sugar dispensers in the faculty lounge. The stars darkened. Do you think Hans Pavel is all right?

  I don’t know . . .

  They exchanged some information about the hole and Fleming showed the young cadet what he had just seen. He withdrew when the drone left the Swift, maintaining only a wisp of communication so that the cadet would see how Fleming Mayhew worked.

  The drone spiralled toward the anamoly, radioing back its conventional measurements. Fleming followed it carefully, holding back. The g-flux slowly increased as the drone approached the hole; no light photons could escape from the hole but there was a slight blue shift in light coming toward the drone from the rest of the galaxy. The light encountered pockets of gas more frequently and the velocity of the pockets increased as the drone came closer to the hole.

  Then the mass detector went off the scale, and the drone was sucked into the anomaly so quickly that Fleming was barely able to follow its path. The computer whispered to him that it had taken 250 microseconds for the drone to disappear. He had followed it so closely that for a moment afterward he could almost see where it had gone.

  He thought of time. . . .

  The Robert B. Leighton approached the hole, but not on the standard probe approach taken by the two lost starships. Fleming had computed a shallow parabola with an apex barely inside the sudden gravitational increase encountered by the drone. The rest of the crew were strapped in, helpless while Fleming controlled the ship with his mind.

  A tendril of thought reached out to him from the Ernest Swift. He held it, strengthening it to a pillar. Hang on, youngster. The stars were cold.

  Warm nights in the pale crystal port of Nellean with a glass of smooth Altair wine . . . The dancing girls of New Frisco with blue hair billowing about their ankles . . . Sita’s cool touch on his arm in the mists of awakening . . .

  A tear crept out of Fleming’s eyes, to be absorbed by the sensing pad; fear was a steel fist around his brain, ready to crush it into a gray pulp.

  The Leighton gathered speed, Fleming’s senses reaching out ahead of it.

  A flare of white-hot brilliance blinded him, as the Leighton lurched toward the anomaly like a toy on a rubber band. He stared into an ebony lake. In a moment his eyes would fall into it and sink like stones. Fleming fired the forward impulse engines, driving the starship back. His eyes were flaming pools of agony. His fourdimensional sight was gone, but the ship’s sensors were unaffected. The pillar of communication with the cadet was sil
ent; the youngster was unconscious. The Leightons structure complained from the opposing forces playing with it. The pillar of communication disappeared as the cadet’s physician woke him from his trance. Fleming reached out with laser tongues to talk to the other ships. The Leighton strained away from the hole, then acceleration rapidly as she broke loose.

  Less than, a minute and a half had passed since Fleming had been blinded. As he relaxed, his intuitive imagination pieced together what he had experienced and he knew what he had seen. . . .

  Fleming’s eyes, though physically uninjured, were still burning when he came out of his trance-like state. He looked up at Sita’s anxious face and was surprised at the clearness of his vision.

  “What happened? Do you know what happened?” Captain Bergier was insistent.

  “Can’t we wait until he gets some rest?” Sita said angrily.

  Fleming’s vision suddenly rippled like the surface of a pond, hurting his eyes. He shook his head and said, “No, Sita. I think we’d better get a preliminary report out right away.” His voice sounded remarkably steady to him. “There’s nothing really strange about the hole itself—it’s big. But it’s the outstream that makes it unique.”

  “What do you mean?” Bergier asked.

  “The outstream goes forward in time, Jack. Time is affected in this rathole tunnel.”

  “But we’ve thought about the effect on time inside a hop-tunnel,” Sita said, “and we know time goes forward in them at the normal rate. What are you talking about, Mayhew?”

  He closed his eyes from the pain and sat back in his couch, saying, “This one goes forward in time. The outstream empties into the gravitational collapse of our universe some 100 billion years from now. It’s a titanic black hole all by itself.”

  “Then Pavel . . .” Sita started to say.

  “Is dead, or hopelessly lost. Somehow, you see, I ran into some light photons in the hole—ran full face into them, almost blinding myself.”

  Sadness entered Sita’s brown eyes. “Poor Pavel!” she whispered.

  “This will be something for the theoretical boys,” Bergier said, stroking his chin. “The cosmos collapses into a black hole of its own—and I suppose it punches out to expand in a new space.”

  Fleming nodded his agreement. “Another universe, created by all the matter and energy streaming from the black hole finale of ours, expanding the fabric of a new space. A fountain of force carving out a place somewhere for all the new expanding matter.”

  He stopped talking, exhausted, thinking: later rat holes will appear in that universe, as in ours, making interstellar travel possible. But they will be the first holes in a sinking ship, holes leading from one part of the ship to another. And one day there will be a large hole like this one, emptying into a black abyss . . .

  Which is a new beginning.

  For now, his job was done. He slept.

  THE TEMPOLLUTERS

  G.C. Edmonson

  . . . in which an absolutely mad scientist comes up with a logical explanation for certain supernatural manifestations . . .

  “I’ve never seen one,” my mad friend protested.

  “You’ll be one if you don’t watch it!” I yelled.

  He swerved past a lorry into a clockwise roundabout. Circling past our off-ramp, my friend said something. From its vehemence I suspected the Arabic abhorrence for things lefthanded was being extended to countries that drive that way.

  Finally I saw an opening. We shot blindly and made it at no cost, save to the disposition of a bowler-hatted gentleman in a mini auto. “Are we going the wrong way?” I asked.

  My mad friend gritted his teeth and ignored me. “What was that address again?” he asked.

  “The Grove, near Harpenden, Fitch Lane, New Maiden—” I stopped for breath.

  “Yet they can get mail delivered three times a day!” he groused.

  In the back wives continued their discussion of whether the new wraith look could be worn with hip boots. Abruptly my mad friend stopped. We got out and entered a tiny office. Behind the desk a small dark man smiled.

  “I don’t believe it!” I said. But I really did. This little man with the dazzling smile of an Algerian rug peddler had been slipping in and out of our lives in different guises, different languages, different countries since my mad friend and I were much smaller cogs in the respective machines that hire us. His improbable stories all hinged around an improbable future whence he had visited us with his roommate’s time machine. He was not marooned here, since he still had the machine. But if the little man were given credence, he had destroyed his own past: A 2500 A.D. golden age where Constantinople never fell and Mohammed was Bishop of Medina. It all sounded too good ever to be true.

  “I believe it.” My mad friend referred to the Byzantine’s smiling presence in a realtor’s office and not to the little man’s improbable past future perfect.

  “You seek isolation,” the Byzantine said. “A large estate with accommodation for a hundred patients—persons!” he hastily corrected.

  “Wait till I get my hands on that security officer!” I said. My mad friend added something in Arabic. It sounded like fingers bending the wrong way.

  Then I remembered how easy it could to be invade files if one could go to the proper spot and wait for a burglarproof building to be erected around one’s invisible time machine.

  “I am prepared to accept ninety thousand pounds,” the Byzantine said. He hesitated a moment then smiled and added, “Or one hundred eighty thousand of which sixty will be equally divided and deposited in two numbered Swiss accounts.”

  “I suppose you know the numbers too?” my friend muttered.

  “Since you have no such accounts I offer the more straightforward proposition first.”

  “What’s he talking about?” a wife asked.

  “A happy old age,” I said. “Providing you’re happy in a non-extraditable country.”

  There was a moment’s silence then wives resumed their discussion of the new wraith look.

  “Ninety thousand then,” the Byzantine said with an earwarping smile.

  Though he drove like a Jew in Egypt, the Byzantine was familiar with wrong-way traffic. Rain, mist, and lack of a pocket compass kept me from knowing for sure if he was circling. Hours later we rumbled over a ready-to-collapse bridge and the car stopped. We walked up an overgrown path to a building by Charles Addams out of the Baskervilles.

  “If you’re ever going to see one, this’s where,” I said.

  “Probably not even a TV,” my friend said.

  “What are you talking about?” a wife asked.

  “Ghosts.”

  “No problem,” the Byzantine hastened.

  “Don’t believe in them,” another wife added.

  “You just shot down 33 and a third of the Trinity,” I said.

  My mad friend made a ritual gesture but said nothing. A massive door creaked and we were in out of the drizzle. The Byzantine produced a flask of some liquid which the locals distill. My mad friend regarded it wistfully.

  I rummaged through my tools and began going over the house with a sniffer. I had covered twenty odd rooms—some of them decidedly odd—in one upstairs wing when my mad friend came looking for me. He saw the pentagon on the floor but apart from a gesture of exorcism made no observation. The Byzantine and various wives were waiting in the foyer.

  “Clean so far,” I reported.

  “Surely no one bugs an empty house,” the Byzantine said.

  “Not bugs,” I explained. “Stray radar beams.”

  My mad friend looked at me and we shrugged. It had seemed like a real fun trip when I’d received a sudden promotion and learned his own mission overlapped mine. Up till now no one had learned that our money belonged to the government of a friendly country. Prices hadn’t been bad but every place had been too close to a road, within sweep of some radar station, or had nosy neighbors. We had been approaching a nadir of soggy booted despair when the description of this place had
arrived without explanation in the morning post.

  “I knew you’d like it,” the Byzantine said.

  It was raining hard again. We made a dash for the car and the Byzantine drove as far as the bridge. He would have driven farther but there was no bridge.

  “Now what?” a wife asked.

  The large American car was not the smartest choice for left handed traffic on narrow, English roads but it had certain saving graces. I used the telephone.

  “Can you wait there till morning?” Shapiro asked.

  “I suppose we can but why should we?”

  “Because every chopper is out rescuing people who’re really in trouble.”

  Since he put it that way . . .

  The Byzantine backed up the driveway and we made another mad dash for the house. My mad friend and I wandered about photographing and sketching, trying to deduce a floor plan. “Like one of Sarah Winchester’s bad days,” my friend muttered as he scratched out another line. “There were eleven rooms on that side, weren’t there?”

  “Who cares? They’ll knock partitions out to suit themselves. Incidentally, do you have any idea what this place is really going to be?”

  “My first wild guess would be a demesne for demented Top Secret types who can’t be shunted off to just any old State Home for the Bewildered.”

  I pondered a moment. “Could be; but I’m not a counter surveillance man. Strikes me as if they need some place where the air isn’t full of UHF garbage. Nobody said anything about debugging. And since this is the only country on Earth with lousier security than ours, why not in some congressman’s home district?”

  “Ours not to reason why,” my mad friend said. Suddenly he looked to one side.

  Que paso? I asked.

  He shrugged and we continued measuring and sketching until it turned dark. Downstairs we found a picnic lunch laid out on a baronial table. The Byzantine wore his usual ineradicable smile but all wives were very quiet. Once more I asked, “What happened?”

  “I saw something,” a wife said.