by Jerry
Then she realized what she was seeing. A creature from another world, a dream at arm’s length, toying with its pursuers. She inhaled, opened her mouth to speak.
The shape veered to the side, cutting across the bow. The launch ran up onto it and stopped with an abrupt clatter of equipment.
Sarah was catapulted over the side. For a fleeting second she thought something had seized her, jerking her from the boat. No, she was falling, loose-limbed and helpless as a doll, downwards into darkness. The water rose up, slapped her, swallowed her.
Cold, bone-chilling cold. Loch Ness never gives up its dead. Her open mouth filled with water, her throat clogged with it. Her blood clotted with horror. The sensation drained from her hands, her limbs. Then, with some desperate flash of rationality she told herself, Dammit, you can swim! She thrust herself upwards, breaking the surface, spitting and coughing. The boat, where was the boat!
Her waterlogged sweater dragged her back under. Into the element of the creature, borne downwards into impenetrable night. She fought, screaming silently, for the surface.
A searing breath of air. Shouts in the distance, a motor. And something touched her leg. Her numbed nerve endings thrilled with it, a rough, flexible appendage. She wrenched away, floundering, and the water pulled her down again. Crushing cold, and darkness watching, waiting . . .
Something grabbed her and dragged her gasping into the air. She struck out, but she was moving in slow motion, hands like lead weights.
It was Mark. “Hey,” he shouted, “calm down.”
Easy for you to say. This isn’t your nightmare. Hands pulled her from the water and hauled her like a sack of dead fish over the gunwale of the boat; she noted the metal ridge but felt no pain. Mark splashed down beside her and she clutched at him, shivering with more than cold.
“Are you all right?” Don asked. And to the others, “Get the towfish in, quick. We have to get her back to camp.” He peeled off his jacket and wrapped it around her.
Her hair leaked runnels of water down her face. She was crying, she realized, hot salt tears mingling with the peat-dark drops of chill.
“Towfish is fouled,” someone called.
Don turned. “That sudden stop; could’ve been a log, I guess.”
“Yeah. Sure. I just hope we didn’t hurt it.”
They hauled in the torpedo-like bundle of equipment, clucking solicitously. The motor roared and the boat slapped against the waves. The banks of the loch heaved and shuddered, tumbling from the sky in waves of varied green.
“What got into you?” Mark asked. “You were flailing around out there as if you’d never swum before.”
“S-scared,” she stammered.
“Of what? Of Nessie?”
“Of the dark. Of getting lost in the dark. Of never coming back.”
“Sarah,” he sighed, shaking his head, but even so he pulled her closer to him.
Don sat beside them and opened the thermos. The sketch lay water-stained at his knee. “I like that,” he said “Always admired old Horatio.”
His courage? Or his ego? Sarah’s teeth chattered on the cup Don offered. “Thank you.”
The boat sped up the loch, riding the crest of superstition, suspended between daylight and shadow.319">
Sarah stood on the narrow curve of beach beside Urquhart Bay. Behind her were the trailers—the caravans, she corrected herself—of the Expedition. The rhythmic chug of a motor, a door slamming, voices; the evening stillness caught it all and held it suspended, swirling particles of sound. Shadows lay long across the glassy surface of the loch.
Hands touched her shoulders and she started. Mark’s voice intoned, “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night . . .”
“Good Lord deliver us,” Sarah finished. How appropriate.
He stood beside her, contemplating translucent sky and translucent water separated by the black horizontal slash of the opposite shore. “Sarah,” he said, “surely you didn’t mean to imply this morning that Don is only hunting sensation.”
“I’d like to see him turn down a guest spot on the Carson show.”
Mark snorted. “All right; we all want a shot at immortality. But give him some credit as a scientist.”
“And what he’s doing is cool, dispassionate scientific research? Cheap rhetoric.” She scuffed at the gravel. The water lapped questioningly at her toe. “It’s like those people who say they’ve seen a UFO. They have an emotional stake in the answer. They want to believe there’s more to existence than death and taxes.”
“So?” He stared at her, brows tight, as he would stare at some unidentifiable marine creature.
“Irrefutable evidence? Tapes, pictures, whatever, it all comes in through the senses and is evaluated by that brain which causes emotions, too. The local superstitions are evidence. One of my drawings is as valid as a photograph.”
“But not in the same way. Superstitions, art—they can’t be quantified.”
“Why should everything be quantified? Because your particular fear of the dark finds comfort in quantification?”
A boat beat up the loch, sending shock waves through the twilight. After a long time Mark laid his arm across Sarah’s shoulders and said quietly, “Julie’s death was—pretty ghoulish, wasn’t it? Respirators, plastic tubing, all the technological paraphernalia that only prolonged her agony and left us to wonder why.”
She stood stock still in the circle of his arm. She had thought him insensitive, but what he was, it seemed, was sensible. “Yes,” she whispered, “if we didn’t wonder why we’d be vegetables.”
A faint gleam diffused into the sky above the dark ridge of the distant shore. A thin pale gold circlet swelled up and out. The moon rose over Loch Ness and laid a shining path across the water.
“Beautiful,” said Sarah. She could step onto the light, follow the path up and across the dark water and into the sky. She could dance among the Pleiades, as light as one of her pencil-and-paper fairies, unencumbered by mortal flesh.
Mark’s face was burnished by the light. How handsome he was, how sturdy. She warmed in his glow.
“Just think,” he said, “how much equipment the Apollo astronauts had to leave up there. Perfectly good cameras.”
Sarah’s image cracked, shattering into crystalline shards that cut deep . . . No. They did not cut. She would not let them cut. They tickled instead, and she clung to his arm wreathed in helpless giggles.
“Now what?” he asked warily.
“You. You’re so refreshingly honest, straightforward, unimaginative.”
“That’s a compliment?”
“Yes. Yes, actually it is.”
“Okay,” Mark said, baffled but obliging.
Sarah could see him plunging fearlessly into the dark, eager to see what lay on the other side. Foolish bravado, to court the silent shapes in the depths, to risk oblivion. Wasn’t it?
They turned toward their own tiny trailer, pausing just outside for one glance back at the gleaming celestial disc. “Luna,” Sarah conjugated, “lunacy, lunar tides, lunar rover.” Light, perhaps, an imperative beyond darkness.
Arm in arm they went inside and shut the door on the night.
Sarah stood on the threshold of the Expedition hut. It was morning of a clear day. Brilliant sunshine dawned on the waters of the loch before her, and the waters heaved, slowly, stretching toward the light.
Beneath the surface sheen, in the darkness where the light could not penetrate, an earlier expedition had found ancient stone rings. Relics of an earlier time when the water level had been lower, Sarah told herself. Man’s ancient impulse toward ritual, to propitiate the dark even as it swallowed him. To defy it.
No one was in camp; Don and the rest of the Expedition staff had left early to haul the submersible up to Lochend. Mark had promised to follow later that afternoon. Right now he was working over the monitors in the hut, creating a minestrone of wire, capacitors, transformers, trying to line their 110-volt equ
ipment to the 220-volt power source.
Rather like us, Sarah thought. Two different voltages, the neurasthenic nut mated to the scientist, together forming something unique and vital.
Mark was humming something under his breath that could have been anything from a Beatles tune to a Beethoven symphony. With a grimace Sarah tucked her sketchbook under her arm and strolled down to the beach. There was another anomalous wake pleating the water, probably an echo of the Expedition launch.
One of the videotape camera leads was snagged on a rock, and she bent to retrieve and straighten it. The sinuous shape of the wire piqued her imagination. She sat down beside it and drew a pencil from her pocket. The wires became living appendages reaching into the water, reaching into another element, defining shapes in a shadowy world, human eyes and ears and voices, human senses cleaving the darkness. If truth is beauty, she thought, perhaps science was indeed art. What did scientists want, after all, but to believe in the quark or the quasar or the validity of the human observer who named them both?
Mark stopped humming, encountering some problem that absorbed his entire attention. Sarah began humming, stilling a quaver of fear with melody. The twin wave of the wake crimped the surface of the loch.
She remembered the peat-dark water closing over her head. She remembered the touch of something—not unearthly, because it was from Earth.
Without darkness, light would be meaningless; without light, darkness would be impenetrable. Human perception was sketched in shades of gray. The quest for understanding, whether pursued by scientist or artist or tabloid myth-monger, was its own ritual of propitiation.
She grinned; here I go again, purple prose and all. Julie used to call me a real vapor-head, and she was probably right.
Sarah’s pencil danced. An animal, long neck, flippers, strong rhomboidal tail sending it with swift, sure strokes through the darkness. An animal questing, warily, fearfully, toward the mystery of light.
Several salmon leaped from the loch and fell back, spattering themselves across the water. The wake followed, the twin wave curling white and thick. Iridescent bubbles skimmed upwards, neither light nor dark, joining world to world.
A long dark neck, eyes and nostrils like slits, thin protuberances like horns. A mouth gaping open, seizing a salmon. A thrashing in the water, spray cast upwards like tiny prisms into the sun.
The fish disappeared. Sarah’s pencil fell from nerveless hands. The illusions of the loch, the surface concealing the depths—she could not trust her senses. She had called it, surely, from the fevered depths of her need to believe.
The creature flopped over, flippers beating the air, rounded belly facing the sky. Its thick tail beat the water, sending droplets high into the air. The droplets, cold ice flakes, fell on Sarah’s face and she started.
It was there. Not an object of fear, but of awe. An affirmation. She stepped backwards, one foot behind the other. Her sketchbook trembled in her hands. “Mark,” she called hoarsely. “Mark, come down here, please.”
The creature lay still, back arching from the water, wavelets licking at its skin. Its head and neck curled from side to side, slowly, seeking food.
“Mark!” Sarah croaked.
Distracted, he called, “Huh? What?”
“Forget the monitors. Get your camera, if your own eyes aren’t good enough.” And a moment later, softly, “Thank you, Julie.”
“What?” Mark called again, plunging down the embankment to her side. He hadn’t brought a camera.
“There,” she said, with a grand wave at the loch, the wake, the fish, the basking creature. It seized another salmon, tilted its neck upwards, splashed about as if playing with its prey.
Mark collapsed onto a rock, swearing slowly, reverently, under his breath.
Sarah plucked another pencil from her pocket and began to sketch. Head, neck, back—even the fish leaping from the water.
“No camera,” Mark mourned. “Strobe’s blown a fuse. No sonar, no hydrophone.”
“You can see it, can’t you?” Sarah flipped to the next page in her book, beginning again. Magic flowed through her eyes, through her fingertips; the image leaped from the paper.
“I see it,” said Mark. “Whether it’s really there is another matter.”
“Yes, Mr. Spock,” she returned with a smile.
The creature slipped beneath the waves and disappeared. The water smoothed itself and lay still. The sunsheen reflected from the surface of the loch like from a burnished shield.
Sarah’s fingers slowed and stopped. She was weak with effort. Her knees buckled and she sat beside Mark.
“God!” he wailed. “No camera!” His eye fell upon her drawings and lightened. “Hey, those are good. Now if we can only get Don to believe it.”
“Do you believe it?” she asked quietly.
“Yes. I saw something. And I’d sure like to see it again, even if it takes a lot of looking.”
“That’s all that matters.”
“Is it? Is it really?” He laughed. “It’s that easy, then?”
“No, it’s never easy,” Sarah replied. “But the wanting to search; that’s enough.” They sat close together by the deep water. The darkness ebbed.
THE FINAGLE FIASCO
Don Sakers
Yes, I remember the Murphy episode. Of course, I was not Grand Master of Euler at the time—I was only Assistant Christensen Professor of Topology. Still, I don’t suppose anyone will ever forget that time, when the Math Institute here on Euler was all that stood between the galaxy and total domination by a sadistic megalomaniac.
What’s that? Oh, yes, I know the Psychology Institute has done penance for allowing Khar-Davii to take over. And I understand that they say it can never happen again. Well, I wonder—psychology is not of course an exact discipline, like math.
Eh? Yes, the Murphy episode. As I recall, it was shortly after the spring term had begun. I had trouble with some of my displays; the Twenty-Dimension Simulator had developed a singularity, and simply would not accept fields with more than eighty operations. Maintenance told me that the entire system would have to be shut down for reprogramming, and I went to the Grand Master for approval. She was conversing on the hyperwave; I waited until she was done. In due time she opened the privacy hood and smiled at me. “Ah, Professor Yagwn. How are you?”
“Fine, Madam. And yourself?”
She sighed. “I could be better, Yagwn. You’ve heard of this Khar-Davii, who calls himself the Conqueror? Well, it appears that he has taken over the Galactic Council and killed the Co-ordinator. He has proclaimed himself Monarch of Humanity, and the inhabited worlds are falling all over their own feet to surrender to him.”
I recalled hearing something about the matter on the news. “Are his weapons that formidable?”
“Apparently so. Euler is the only planet that has not yielded. I was just talking with the outlying Galactic Traffic station—Khar-Davii’s fleet is even now heading toward this world.” She glanced at a data screen on her desk. “Ah, excuse me. The fleet has arrived. We are surrounded.”
I had no opportunity to voice an opinion. There was a bright flash of light, and suddenly the image of a corpulent human man appeared in the center of the Grand Master’s office. Behind him were banks of machinery tended by warriors in full battle dress.
“I am Khar-Davii, the Conqueror. Your miserable planet has refused to accept my rule. You will surrender to me now or I will destroy your world.”
I suppressed a grin; the Grand Master did not bother to hide her amusement. “I hardly think it is a miserable world. I rather like it. Conqueror, your plan of conquest would interfere with our spring term, and I’m sure that the commotion would upset many of our scholars.”
Khar-Davii narrowed his brows. “As I was told—you are totally out of touch with the real universe. Mathematicians and philosophers—not a practical being in the bunch.”
The Grand Master lost her smile. One thing that always bothered her was the accusation that
Euler was out of touch with reality. To her, math was the highest form of reality. She stood and faced Khar-Davii.
“My dear Conqueror, I will not allow you to bother Euler. If you wish to attack, then do so—but let me show you something of our defenses first.” She touched a button, and a screen behind her showed the image of a great cannon.
I drew in my breath sharply at the sight.
“And what is that machine, Grand Master?” Khar-Davii asked with a smile. “Will it shoot strings of numbers at us?”
The Grand Master answered with another smile. “No doubt, Conqueror, a man with your military background has heard of the Murphy laws? That which can go wrong, will go wrong. Here we have them formulated as a theorem, and implemented as a weapon.”
“And this is your defense?”
She spread her hands and regarded him as though he were a simpleton—which seemed readily apparent. “Long ago we investigated the Murphy laws completely. This machine amplifies their effects. If you attack us, your guns will fail to fire, your ships will suffer instrument breakdowns, your most trusted officers will trip and accidentally sound recall orders. You could never beat us.”
Khar-Davii dissolved in a fit of laughter. “My fleet has been listening to this conversation—now they know what ‘terrible weapon’ Euler will use against them.” He stopped chuckling. “Grand Master, prepare for your death. Fleet—Attack!”
The attack did not last long.
Since I had a little time to spare, I watched it on the viewscreens from the Grand Master’s office. After twenty minutes or so, only the Conqueror’s flagship was left in fighting condition. It was not too long afterward that Khar-Davii’s image reappeared in the office. The Conqueror was harried and bedraggled, and there was fear in his eyes.
“Can I help you, Conqueror?” the Grand Master asked.
“Enough. Enough. Turn off that machine. We will sue for peace. I will not attack your planet any more.”
“Fine.” She pressed another button. “Your treaty has been logged. We have other weapons that we can use against you, should you try to break your word. I will thank you now to take the remnants of your fleet away without bothering us . . . we have important work to do.”