The Paradox Men

by Charles L. Harness

  “He might exist as two persons at once?” asked Juana-Maria curiously.

  “Quite possibly.”

  Keiris listened to her own strangled voice. “Is he—is either of those persons—in this room—now?”

  The Mind was silent for a long time. Finally he turned great sad eyes up to her. “Madame’s question is surprising in view of the obvious danger to her husband if her surmise proves correct. Yet I answer as follows. One embodiment of Muir, whose existence has just been deduced by her majesty the Imperatrix in the exercise of null-Aristotelian logic is present, but does not at the moment choose to be visible to us.”

  He paused and glanced at the radiochron on the wall at his left. Some of the others followed his gaze.

  It was four minutes after midnight. Somewhere far above them a new day was dawning—July 21, 2177.

  “However,” continued the Mind, “Muir is also present in another, entirely different form, one that would be satisfactory even to Marshal Eldridge.”

  The ministers exchanged startled, suspicious glances.

  Eldridge sprang to his feet. “Point him out!” he cried.

  “The Minister for War,” observed Haze-Gaunt, “is strangely naïve if he thinks the Mind is going to point out Kennicot Muir to this assembly.”

  “Eh?” said Eldridge. “You mean he’s afraid to name him?”

  “Perhaps; perhaps not. But let us see what a highly direct and specific question will bring.” He turned toward the Mind and asked softly, “Can you deny that you are Kennicot Muir?”

  As Alar’s stunned eyes watched the pyrometer, the needle began slowly to creep up the scale, recording the fall of the station into the sunspot vortex—4,560, 4,580, 4,600.

  The deeper, the hotter. Of course, the station would never reach the sun’s core. The vortex would probably narrow to nothing within a thousand miles or so, in a region deep enough to have a temperature of a few million degrees. The solarion’s insulative-refrigeration system could stand a top limit of 7,000.

  The possibilities were several. The spot vortex might extend deep into the sun’s core, with its temperature of some twenty million degrees. But even if the vortex gas stayed under 7,000 degrees all the way to the center—and he knew it could not—the station would eventually crash into the enormously dense core and burst into incandescence.

  But suppose the vortex did not extend to that incredibly hot center, but, more probably, originated only a few thousand miles down? He spit out a mouthful of blood and calculated rapidly. If the spot were 16,000 miles deep the temperature at the cone apex would be a little below 7,000.

  If the station would float gently to rest there, he might live for several hours before the heavy plant sank deeply enough to reach an intolerable temperature. But that wasn’t going to happen. Its landing wouldn’t be gentle. The station was now falling under an acceleration of twenty-seven gravities, and would probably strike the bottom of the cone at a velocity of several miles a second despite the viscosity of the spot gases. Everything about him would instantly disintegrate.

  He was aware of the chair cushions pushing against his back. The metal tubing along the arms seemed considerably warmer now to his touch. His face was wet, but his mouth was dry. The thought reminded him of Captain Andrews’s cache.

  With nothing to do for the moment, he acted on his sudden whim. He rose, stretched himself and walked over to the wall which supported the refrigerated cabinet. He opened the door and felt the sudden wave of cool air against his perspiring face. He chuckled at an irrational thought: why not crawl into the six cubic foot box and shut the door behind him?

  He pulled out the bottle of foam and squeezed some of the thick liquid into his mouth. The sensation was extremely pleasant. He closed his eyes and for a moment imagined that Captain Andrews was next to him, saying, “It’s cold and that’s plenty welcome in a place like this.”

  He swung the door shut again on the bottle. A meaningless gesture, he thought to himself. The situation seemed so unreal. Keiris had warned him…

  Keiris.

  Did she sense, at this moment, what he was facing?

  He snorted at his own thoughts and returned to the chair.

  Just precisely what did he face?

  There were, indeed, several possibilities, but their conclusions were identical—a long wait, then an instantaneous, painless oblivion. He couldn’t even count on an enduring, excruciating pain that might release him along the time axis, as it had done in Shey’s torture room.

  He became aware of a low, hollow hum, and finally traced it to the pulse at his temple. His heart was beating so fast that the individual beats were no longer detectable. The pulse had passed into the lower audio range, which meant a beat of at least twelve hundred a minute.

  He almost smiled. In the face of the catastrophe that Haze-Gaunt was about to wreak on Earth, the frenzied concern of his subconscious mind for his own preservation seemed suddenly amusing.

  It was then that he noticed that the room was tilted slightly. That should not be, unless the giant central gyro was slowing down. The gyro should keep the station upright in the most violent faculae and tornado prominences. A quick check of the control panel showed nothing wrong with the great stabilizer.

  But the little compass gyro was turning slowly, in a very odd but strangely familiar way, which he recognized immediately. The station axis was gradually being inclined at an angle from the vertical and was rotating about its old center in a cone-like path.

  The solarion was precessing, which meant that some unknown titanic force was attempting to invert it and was being valiantly fought off by the great central gyro.

  But it was a losing battle.

  He had a fleeting vision of the great station turning turtle in slow, massive grandeur. The muirium anti-grav drive overhead, now cancelling 26 of the 27 G’s of the sun, would soon be beneath him, and adding to those 27 G’s. Against 53 G’s he would weigh some four tons. His blood would ooze from his crushed, pulpy body and spread in a thin layer over the deck.

  But what could be trying to turn the station over?

  The pyrometers showed almost identical convection temperatures on the sides, top and bottom, of the station—about 5,200 degrees. And radiation heat received on the sides and bottom of the plant showed about 6,900, as could be expected. But the pyrometers measuring radiation received on the upper surface of the station, which should not have exceeded 2,000 degrees—since the station surface normally was radiated only by the thin surface photosphere—showed the incredible figure of 6,800.

  The station must be completely immersed in the sun. The uniform radiation on all sides proved that. Yet he was still in the sunspot vortex, as shown by the much cooler convention currents bathing the station. There was only one possible explanation. The spot vortex must be returning to the sun’s surface through a gigantic U-shaped tube.

  Anything going down one limb of the tube would naturally ascend the other limb inverted. The U-tube finally explained why all spots occurred in pairs and were of opposite magnetic polarity. The ionized vortex of course rotated in opposite directions in the respective limbs of the tube.

  If the central gyro won out over the torrential vortex, the station might be swept up the other limb of the following spot twin and he might break the station away to safety over the penumbral edge—in which improbable event he could live as long as his punctured lung permitted, or until the storage chambers became filled with muirium and the synthesizer began turning the deadly material back into the sun to trigger a gigantic explosion.

  But he could be sure that even if the station were found during that interval there would be no rescue. The discovery would be made by Imperial search vessels and the I.P.’s would simply keep the station under observation until the inevitable filling of the muirium holds.

  The brooding man sat in the central operator’s chair for a long time, until the steepening floor threatened to drop him out of his seat. He rose heavily to his feet and, hanging tight
ly to the guide rails, walked the length of the panel to a bank of huge enabling switches.

  Here he unlocked the safety mechanism of the central gyro switch and pulled it out amid a protest of arcking, hissing flame. The deck immediately began to vibrate beneath him, and the rapidly increasing tilt of the floor made it difficult to stand.

  The room was spinning dizzily about him as he lashed a cord to the master switch controlling the outer hatches of the muirium locks overhead. The free end he tied around his waist.

  When the station turned on its back he would fall to the other end of the room and the cord attached to his lunging body would jerk open the muirium hatch switch. All the stored muirium would begin to dissolve back into its native energy quanta, the station would suddenly become a flat, gigantic space rocket and—at least theoretically— would be hurled through the rising U-limb at an unimaginable velocity.

  If he were human, he would be killed instantly. If he were not human, he might survive the fantastic initial acceleration and accompany the station into the black depths of space.

  The deck had almost become a vertical wall. The gyro had probably stopped and there was no turning back. For a moment he regretted his decision. At least he could have lived on a little while longer.

  Always a little longer. He had squeezed out five years of life by that method. But no more. Sweat squirted from his face as, slipping and sliding, he clawed insanely at the smooth steel tiles of the deck that was now soaring over him to become the new ceiling. Then he dropped straight to what a few minutes before had been the ceiling and lay there helpless under a 53-G gravity, unable even to breathe and swiftly losing consciousness.

  He knew vaguely that the rope had pulled the switches to the muirium locks, and had then broken under his enormously increased weight—that jagged fragments of his snapping ribs had pierced his heart—that he was dying.

  In that instant the muirium caught. Four thousand tons of the greatest energy-giving substance ever known to man collapsed in a millisecond into a titanic space-bending shower of radiation.

  He had no sensation of pain, of movement, of time, of body, of anything. But he didn’t care. In his own way he was still very much alive.

  Alar was dead.

  And yet he knew who he was and where his destiny lay.

  20

  Armageddon

  GODDARD, NUCLEAR MINISTER, was on his feet, staring wide-eyed alternately at the Mind and at Haze-Gaunt. “The Mind—Kennicot Muir? Impossible!”

  Phelps of Airways was gripping the sides of his chair with white, trembling hands, and his fingernails were cracking and doubling back from the pressure. “How do you know it’s impossible?” he shouted. “The Mind must answer that question!”

  Keiris swallowed in an ecstasy of misery. She had precipitated something the Mind might not have been ready for. Thinking back, she could find no good reason for asking her question, other than intuition. But Haze-Gaunt must be wrong. Obviously the Mind could not be her husband. They had about the same build, but there the resemblance ended. Why, the Mind was—ugly. Then she stole a look at Haze-Gaunt, and lost some of her certainty.

  Of the assembly, only the chancellor appeared at ease. He was reclining quietly in his plush chair, his long legs crossed casually. His perfect confidence said plainly—“I am sure of the answer and I have taken extraordinary precautions.”

  For Eldridge the situation was becoming unendurable. “Answer, damn you!” he cried, drawing his pistol.

  Haze-Gaunt waved him back irritably. “If he is Muir, he is also an armored Thief. Put that toy away and sit down.” He turned to the Mind again. “The very fact of your delay is highly revealing, but what could you hope to gain by it? A few moments more of life?” His mouth warped in the faintest of sneers. “Or doesn’t the best-informed man in the system know who he is?”

  Haze-Gaunt’s tarsioid peeped, trembling, over his master’s epaulette at the Mind, who had not changed his position. His arms rested on the arms of his chair as they had always rested. To Keiris he appeared almost as calm as usual. But Haze-Gaunt, savoring almost sensuously his victory in a generation-long struggle with the man he hated most, apparently saw something more.

  “Before us, gentlemen,” he observed grimly, “for all his aura of wisdom, we have a frightened animal.”

  “Yes, I am frightened,” said the Mind, in a strong clear voice. “While we are here playing tag with identities, Toynbee Twenty-one is reeling under its death blow. If you had not forbidden all interruptions of this conference you would know that the Eastern Federation declared war on America Imperial eighty seconds ago!”

  What a magnificent bluff! thought Keiris in desperate admiration.

  “Gentlemen,” said Haze-Gaunt, looking about him. “I trust that all of you appreciate the finer points of the Mind’s latest finesse. The riddle of his identity suddenly becomes lost in the excitement of gigantic but fictitious surmises. I think we may now return to my question.”

  “Ask Phelps about his secret ear receptor,” said the Mind coolly.

  Phelps looked uncomfortable. Then he muttered: “The Mind’s right—whoever he is. I have a hearing aid but it’s also a radio. The Eastern Federation actually did declare war as he said.”

  The queer silence that followed was finally broken by Haze-Gaunt.

  “This obviously changes things. The Mind will be placed under close arrest for further examination at our convenience. In the meantime the council is wasting time here. All of you have standing orders for this contingency. You will now carry them out to the letter. We stand adjourned.”

  He stood up. Keiris forced herself not to collapse as she relaxed.

  The ministers filed out hurriedly and their footsteps and nervous whispers died away down the peristyle. The bronze elevator doors began to clang shut.

  Then Haze-Gaunt turned abruptly and reseated himself. His hard eyes again fastened on the disfigured but calm face of the man in the domed pit.

  Keiris’s breathing grew faster. It was not over—it was just beginning.

  The Mind seemed lost in a reverie, totally indifferent to the probability of imminent death.

  Haze-Gaunt drew a pistol-like thing from his jacket pocket. “This is a poison-dart thrower,” he said softly. “The dart can easily penetrate your plastic shell. It need only scratch you. I want you to talk about yourself and to tell me a great deal. You may begin now.”

  The Mind’s fingers drummed indecisively on the arm of his chair. When he looked up it was not at his executioner but at Keiris. It was to her that he spoke.

  “When your husband vanished ten years ago, he told you that he would contact you through me. At that time I was an obscure sideshow freak. Only in recent years have I had access to the vast literature that has brought me to my present preeminent position.”

  “Might I interrupt?” murmured Haze-Gaunt. “The original Meganet Mind, an obscure entertainer, had a remarkable resemblance to you. But it so happens that he died ten years ago in a circus fire. Oh, I admit that the burn tissue on your face and hands is genuine. In fact, you burned your features deliberately. With the record corrected, pray continue.”

  Keiris watched in fascinated horror as the Mind licked dry lips.

  The Mind said, “My disguise has finally failed, then. But until now, I believe, no one suspected my identity. The wonder of it is that I was not exposed years ago. But to go on—through Keiris, I relayed vital information to the Society of Thieves, which I hoped would overthrow your rotten administration and save our civilization. But their gallant efforts are now cut short. The most brilliant minority cannot reform a disintegrating society in a bare decade.”

  “Then you admit that we have beaten you and your vaunted Society?” demanded Haze-Gaunt coldly.

  The Mind looked at him thoughtfully. “Half an hour ago I intimated that Alar had attained a semi-godhood. Whether or not you have beaten me and my ‘vaunted Society’ depends on the identity of the intelligence we have been calling Alar.
”

  “Don’t hide behind words,” snapped Haze-Gaunt.

  “You may be able to understand me if I put it this way. In the Central Drome of the Airways Laboratories lies the recently completed T-Twenty-two, standing by to blast off on its maiden voyage. Five years ago, as you well know, a white-hot space ship crashed into the Ohio River and the River Police found some remarkable things. The metallic parts of the ship were identical in composition with the alloys that Gaines and I had worked out for the T-Twenty-two.

  “Was the race of a neighboring star trying to reach our sun? We waited for further evidence. It turned up the next day when a man was found wandering along the river bank, dazed, almost naked, carrying a leather-bound book with him. The book bore the gold-stamped legend—T-twenty-two, Log. There is one just like it in the pilot’s room of our own T-twenty-two.”

  “You weave a fine story,” said Haze-Gaunt, “but we must cut it short I fear. I wanted real information, not a disjointed fairy tale.” He raised the dart-pistol. The tarsioid disappeared screaming down his back.

  “That man was Alar the Thief,” said the Mind. “Shall I continue or do you wish to try to kill me now?”

  Haze-Gaunt hesitated, then lowered the pistol. “Continue,” he said.

  “We kept Alar under observation in the lodgings of two Thieves, now dead. Always we held before us the possibility that he was one of your spies. The truth of his identity grew upon me only gradually, when no other explanation was possible.

  “Let us look at the facts. A ship identical to the T-twenty-two landed on Earth five years ago. Yet the T-twenty-two is not due to blast off on its maiden voyage until a quarter of an hour from now. Regardless of any other facts or theory involved the ship will start moving backward in time as soon as it is launched, and will continue to move until it crashes—should I say ‘crashed’?—five years ago.

  “The man who shall become transformed into Alar through a geotropic response, or otherwise, and whom we might call Mr. X, will board the T-twenty-two in a few minutes with an unidentified companion, and they will be carried away in the ship at a velocity faster than that of light. Such velocities require movement backward in time, so that when Mr. X finally pilots the T-twenty-two back to Earth, he lands five years earlier than when he started. He emerges as Alar and is henceforth irrecognizable as Mr. X.”